On The Crisis Of National Culture Of The Post-colonial Countries In V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend In The River

V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner, is regarded as the most important immigrant writer in British literature. He is one of the most important post-colonial writers, and his interpretation of post-colonial era announces to the world all sorts of problems about survival and development of national culture in the post-colonial era after the independence of their countries. His novel A Bend in the River, one of his important post-colonial works, is regarded as the last modern epic. It objectively presents in the post-colonial countries the living conditions of people and problems in the development of their national culture. With the help of the post-colonial theory of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon, etc., the situation of the national culture of the town in A Bend in the River is explored and analyzed in this thesis. The situation of the national culture of the town in A Bend in the River represents the post-colonial countries’national culture condition in some ways. At the same time, the political and cultural strategy to prompt the development of the post-colonial countries in the modern time are put forward. To start with, the thesis analyzes the crisis of cultural survival caused by western cultural imperialism and backward African cultural factors. Then, the thesis explores the crisis of cultural belief made by the hybridity in the post-colonial era, concerning the hybridity of multicultural identity, the loss of ideology, the "Sick Child" of British culture and the anxiety of tradition and modernity. Finally, this thesis studies the crisis of cultural construction. The country in A Bend in the River adopts two ways to construct its national culture, the way of primordialism and the way of modernism. However, the reality is that the Africa does not have a stable historical base and the construction of modernism is blindly fast-paced, so neither the way of primordialism nor the way of modernism succeeds. To conclude, the exploration of the crisis of national culture in the town at "a bend in the river" in the novel helps to find the problems existed in the development of national culture in the post-colonial countries. Also, this thesis has some political and cultural implications for the construction of the national culture. Under the background of multicultural coexistence in modern time, the international community should give more chances and spaces to the development of third-world countries; the third-world countries should also strengthen its national self-consciousness and confidence, and properly handle with the relationship between its national culture and other culture especially western dominate culture. In this way, they can finally take steps on a way of national culture development in their national characteristics.