Cultural Hybridities In Dances With Wolves, The Last Of The Mohicans And Stolen Women:Captured Hearts

The communications and interactions between different countries are happening more and more frequently than before with the rapid progress of globalization. The economic, political and cultural exchanges between different countries and regions are enriched in this process. As a result, the cultural encounters attract a great amount of attentions from scholars. As a salad bowl and an immigration country, the U.S. has a complicated history and a diversified population composition. It is a place where cultural encounters happen almost every day. While as a cultural phenomenon, film can reflect the encounters of and exchanges between different cultural groups. Films can exert direct influences on audiences because of its visual, audio and psychological stimulations. Therefore, U.S. films can serve as the most effective study objects in terms of cultural encounters.Post-colonialism is a heatedly debated and widely applied cultural theory system by scholars in the field of cultural studies. There are many existing literatures in the field of post-colonial film studies. Authors of these literatures have applied the theories of Edward Wadie Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha in their works. They criticized the cultural imperialism, cultural colonization, cultural appropriation, Orientalism and the image of the "other" which are showed in U.S. films and made great academic contributions. However, they mainly focused on the influences of the colonizers’cultures on the colonized ones. While according to Homi K. Bhabha’s theory on Hybridity, cultural encounters would produce results under the effects of interactions and mutual influences.As post-colonial film studies became a hot issue in1980s and prospered in globalized post-colonial criticism wave after that, American films screened in1990s became more worthy of study as they were produced in that historical background (He,"Film Theory"49). The three chosen films Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and Stolen Women:Captured Hearts (1997) were screened in1990s and are about the relationships between the Indians and the white colonizers. Traditionally, the white colonizers’culture is considered as the "strong culture", while the Indians’is considered as the weak one, with the former exerts greater influences on the latter. Therefore the three chosen films are representative for the author’s study.Textual analyses will be made in this thesis, applying Homi K. Bhabha’s theory on Hybridity, with the purpose of studying the three films, of seeking evidences of the interactions between people from the two cultures, of proving that the mutual influences on the individuals who are immersed in the opposite’s culture and of explaining that the power of the "weak culture" are also demonstrated in these films, as it is demonstrated in the films to be powerful enough to influence people who are brought up in the background of the "strong culture". The protagonist Dunbar in Dances with Wolves defeats his prejudices on Indians after several contacts with them, goes through a process of ambivalence and mimicry, and finally becomes a cultural hybridity at the end of the film; in The Last of the Mohicans, the white female protagonist Cora falls in love with Hawkeye-the foster son of Chingachgook, a Mohican-who was born as a white and grew up as a Mohican, who became a hybridity under the mutual influences of Indian culture and white culture; in Stolen Women:Captured Hearts, Anna falls in love with Tokalah, an Indian warrior, after she lived in the Indian tribe for one year as she was kidnapped by him and she also becomes a hybridity as she "betrays" white civilization and her white husband.The common trait of these films is the hybrid identities of protagonists. The storyline and identity evolution process are quite different, but the main characters are influenced simultaneously by Indian culture and white culture. In combination with Homi K. Bhabha’s theory about mimicry, ambivalence, hibridity and third space, the author reaches a conclusion that Indian culture and white culture influences individuals in each other’s culture in encounters under the circumstances of individuals being put in the life of the other, voluntarily or involuntarily; people who are influenced by both cultures go through a process of ambivalence, struggle between attractions and repulsions, and become a cultural hybridity at last through actions of mimicry.