On The Manifestation Of Hybridity In Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing

The rise of the Chinese Australian writing has made a great influence in the Anglo world and its achievements have attracted the attention of Western academia. This reflects the awakening and development of literature of ethnic minorities, and shows that ethnic Chinese has become an indispensable part in the multicultural world. As the representative work of contemporary Chinese Australian literature, Shanghai Dancing was the seventh novel written by Brian Castro. It is a story which follows the trip of the narrator Antonio Castro who leaves Australia and goes back to his birthplace China. As a Chinese-Australian writer, Antonio Castro, for his first half of life, suffers a lot from his complicated hybrid background just like his father who was also tortured by the confusion and uncertainty of identity all his life. After his father’s death, Antonio is determined to go back to China where he was born, embarking on a journey of discovery of search for his identity and the history of his ancestry.This work continues to demonstrate Castro’s postmodern writing strategies in terms of dialogue between time and space, blending of fiction and autobiography and mixture of texts and pictures. Castro focuses on challenging against the traditional cultural identity, because of his own hybrid origin and complex life experiences. In order to achieve self-creation, Castro tries a variety of genres to break the tradition by applying post-modern approaches, and he even creates the idea of inviting the readers for creative reading. Undoubtedly, all these factors contribute to the uncertainty and hybridity in Shanghai Dancing.This thesis attempts to adopt Homi. K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to explore the hybrid features in the novel. It firstly analyzes the hybrid identities gained by the narrator and other characters on their road of identity seeking and the hybrid relationships between them as well. After exploring the connection and dislocation between the past and present, and the multilayer narration and theme in the novel culture, the thesis argues that the novel also reaches a kind of hybridity in its writing strategies. It thus concludes that the hybridity of characters’ identities and writing strategies in Shanghai Dancing make it dynamic, hybrid and uncertain in a postcolonial context. Brian Castro seems to stress the significance of mutual respect on redefinition of the multi-culture and at the same time offers a positive alternative to those immigrants who are trapped in the identity crisis: to live a double life from his insider and outsider perspectives.