Nostalgia And In-bewteenness In Hong Ying’s Works

Diasporic Studies have boomed since the1990s, and then turned into acomplicated critical category. However, scholars in mainland China take ‘diaspora’ asa historical and cultural phenomenon other than a literary phenomenon. Even more,Diasporic Literature are now classified together with Immigrant Literature incontemporary Chinese literature academia. In this thesis, I strongly recommend thatwe should take Diasporic Literature as an independent academic class. For myperspective, it is difficult to classify literature by ‘Ethnic Chinese’,‘OverseasChinese’ and ‘Chinese Language’. Because the writer’s identity would change byoccasional incident (e.g. naturalization) etc.Among current influential post-colonialist critiques, Edward W. Said and HomiBhabha’s works have paid more attention to diaspora-related issues. Orientalism(1978) written by Said is the very first critique which focus on the oriental and thethird-world. Bhabha mainly focus on minorities from the third-world, the culturalidentity of diaspora and the narration of nation in his critique the Location of Culture(1994). This these aims to reinterpret contemporary Chinese diasporic writing interms of Said and Bhabha’s theory as the central methodology and try to find out thesubtle relationship between theory and writing as well. The flourishing Chinesediasporic writing not only plays a dual part of both supplement and challenge towestern dominant culture, but also imports some novel inspirations to Chineseliterature, which are all attributed to the “nostalgia” and “in-bewteenness” it contains.In this thesis, I will explore the features which are mentioned above by analyze HongYing’s works Daughter of the River (1997), K (1999) and Shanghai Magicians(2006).Compared with previous generations. Chinese diaspora writers at present haveapplied different literary aesthetics and writing strategies to their works during thepast half century. However, there still exist some deficiencies like “aphasia-to-center”and ‘self-subalternization’. Hong Ying’s writing strategy may give some inspiration toother contemporary Chinese diaspora writers.