Convergence Or Divergence: Dilemma Of Latin American Cultural Identity

In the post-modern era, cultural identity is not stable or fixed anymore. Instead, it is shifting and fluid. Thus, cultural identity crisisbecomes an important research hotspot in the area of culture study.This paper employs One Hundred Years of Solitude as a cultural textto qualitatively decode the identity crisis of Latin America. Like mostdeveloping regions, Latin America suffers from identity crisis, whichis crystallized as the individual and group identity crisis in the novel.Social identity theory is adopted to reveal the essence of LatinAmerican cultural identity dilemma. In addition, the novel alsosuggests that identity crisis of Latin America is mainly attributed tothe difficulty of choosing among different identity orientations, whichis presented as the dilemma between binary cultural dimensions:individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity,linear time versus cyclical time, indulgence versus restraint… Thecultural dimension theory is employed to interpret these dimensions.In all, the research finds that identity crisis of Latin America ismanifested at two levels: the internal cultural disintegration and theambiguous cognition towards the external cultural interference. Theattribution of the identity dilemma is that the Latin cultural valuesystem undergoes inner division and extraneous cultural impact.