On The Construction Of African American Cultural Identity In Mama Day From The Perspective Of Stuart Hall's Diaspora Theory

Gloria Naylor is one of the most insightful and significant novelists in contemporary African American literary world,who creates numerous works with various themes.Compared with other black writers,Naylor has paid more attention to the construction of African American identity,which has been fully expressed in her third novel Mama Day.Recently,foreign and domestic critics have done research on its themes,characters,black tradition and culture,and narrative strategies or have compared it with other novels,but very few scholars have studied the construction of cultural identity of African Americans from the perspective of Diaspora Theory.Based on this point,the thesis will discuss and illustrate it elaborately.This thesis mainly analyzes the cultural identity of African Americans in Mama Day from the perspective of Stuart Hall's three Presences.Stuart Hall's three Presences mainly includes Presence Europeenne,Presence Africaine and Presence Americain.Presence Europeenne is the premise which describes the situation of African Americans being excluded to the margin of the society and them being internalized as "otherness" under the oppression of white mainstream society.Under this circumstance,African Americans tend to question who they really are and then fall into some kind of identity crisis.Presence Africaine serves as the base for constructing this African American identity.It stresses on the inheritance and innovation of African cultural heritage that has been passed down from generation to generation.In the process of inheritance and innovation,the African identity can be reserved naturally.Presence Americain is the place to obtain the American identity and to combine this identity with African identity.For one thing,Presence Americain describes the situation in which African Americans actively integrate themselves into the white mainstream society and accept the white social values,thus obtaining their American identity.For another,Presence Americain depicts that African Americans combine the African identity with the American identity to complete their cultural identity through "assimilation","syncretism" and "creolisation",thereby being acknowledged by the mainstream society.Only by combining the African identity with the American identity can African Americans gain the true sense of cultural acknowledgment from the mainstream society.