Losing Self, Searching Self And Exceeding Self

American ethnic literature originated in the late19th and early20th century, but didn’tget much attention from American mainstream literature. In1960s, with the vigorousdevelopment of Civil Rights Movement and the improvement of the economic and politicalstatus, American minorities began to reflect on their rights and identities. As a result, itwakened the ethnic writers and brought scholars’ attention on American minorities.Furthermore, with the rapid development of American ethnic literature, identity constructionof American minorities stepped into public view.African-American writer Toni Morrison and Chinese-American writer Maxine HongKingston are both famous American ethnic writers in the latter part of the20thcentury. Due totheir intercultural and interethnic background, they are able to focus on the theme of identityand survival of American minorities under culture shock.This thesis, making use of identification theory of post-colonialism, explores similaritiesand differences of American female writer Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston’s(Tingting Tang) views on identity construction. Furthermore their efforts in establishing amulti-cultural society under dual culture background and postcolonial context will bedemonstrated in this thesis.African-American writer Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chinese-Americanwriter Maxine Hong Kingston’s Trip master Monkey: His Fake Book are compared in thisthesis. Through the comparison of the protagonist’s identity construction in each book, twowriters’ views on identity construction are revealed.This thesis consists of three parts.Part one focuses on the significance and research objective of this thesis. Meanwhile anintroduction to post-colonialism and its terms is worked out. Part two elaborates the protagonist’s experience of losing self, searching self andexceeding self in each book. At the same time, it is also a process of self identityconstruction.Part three concentrates on the differences of protagonist’s identity construction betweenthe two books. Moreover, it also analyzes the cause of these differences from perspectives ofobjective, mode and result.At last, this thesis concludes that the plight of American minorities’ identity constructionunder White hegemony can only be reposed to an ideal society of multi-cultural integration.