Struggle Under White Cultural Hegemony:Updike's Brazil

John Updike,one of the most famous America novelist,poet,dramatist,essayist and critics,has created literary works of various genres including the Rabbit Tetralogy,Baker Trilogy and some short stories,poetry and symposiums.His most famous work is Rabbit Series,which helped him gather such honors as the Pulitzer Prize,the National Book Reward and the National Book Critics Circle Award.The novel Brazil exhibits the real life of the black and their fate under the erosion of white cultural hegemony.The status of the black community in the Brazilian societyis extremely embarrassing: on the one hand they are eager to integrate into the upper class;on the other hand they are deeply embraced by the black traditional culture.The novel incorporates surrealism,through the description of the black youth from his runaway from hometown to his return to hometown as a white man,and shows his frantic and blind pursuit to integrate into the white society,which eventually leads to his self lost and the loss of precious life.Based on the critical study on John Updike's Brazil,this paper aims to study culture conflicts between the black and the white from the perspective of Cultural Hegemony in the theory of Post-colonialism.Therefore,one can gain a much wider view to comprehend the Cultural Hegemony impact on the Black after the era of decolonization.Racial discrimination,along with the lost of identity gave rise to the tragedy of the protagonist Tristao as well as the whole black community.In order to realize the equality among people only joint effort from both the black and the white can break through the Cultural Hegemony.Apart from introduction and conclusion,this paper is divided into three body chapters.Chapter one devotes to analyze Brazil with the support of White Cultural Hegemony,which reveals how the white realize his hegemony toward the black.The white people apply to their culture positioning as the mainstream culture to publicize their own cultural values through the educational system and the media,so as to carry out the ideological control over the black people.The mass culture,represented by the media,governs people's cognition and way of thinking,so that the audience become the puppet controlled by the media;The white men control the educational resources,and strangle and bind the growth space of the blacks through education.Chapter two demonstrated the black community was marginalized as the Other through the theory of Orientalism and Other.The black images,represented by the protagonist Tristao,are at the verge of the white society.In the geographical location of the residence,the black population lives in the highest and steepest slope far from the bustling area;in the economic sources,the black women struggled in the world at the expense of living as a whore,and the black men as thieves or being engaged in manual labor.Chapter three applies to Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity and mimicry strategies,thus under the white cultural hegemony,the black's tolerance or compromise or conflict toward white culture hegemony can be demonstrated,and only via inheriting the black culture can the black break through the white culture hegemony,acquiring independence both spiritually and mentally.