An Analysis On The Cultural Identity Construction Of Female Image In Brick Lane From The Perspective Of Postcolonial Feminism

Monica Ali is one of the most influential female writers in British literature today.With unique narrative skills,rich themes and profound thoughts,her works have been well received by Western critics and readers.As a British immigrant writer who was born in Bangladesh,Ali is very concerned about the Third World immigrants(especially Bengali immigrants)and their descendants’ living environment and the problems of their cultural identity construction.The creation of her novels is also mostly based on the life of immigrants in multicultural English society after World War II.Through describing the living environment and mental state of immigrants,it highlights the cultural and social dilemma faced by immigrants under the multicultural background.Brick Lane is the first work of Ali,and it is also one of the most successful work of her.In this novel,Ali presents the issues of race,class,gender,religion and culture of British society in the postcolonial era.In recent years,the domestic scholars’attention to Brick Lane has increased.They have studied the novel from the perspectives of space narration,feminism,identity and other perspectives.But there has no paper which studied it from the perspective of postcolonial feminism with a systematic analysis of the female characters’ cultural identity construction in the novel appeared,which is also the focus of this paper.This paper focuses on the multiple dilemmas that the postcolonial female faces in their identity construction processes and it also analyzes the identity construction course of the female protagonist Nazneen in the novel and her final choice of hybrid identity.At last,this paper puts forward the strategic choices of postcolonial female in face of new challenges in the new century.Along with the advance of globalization,multiculturalism and ethnic mixing have become a common phenomenon.The literary creation of ethnic minorities has become a force that cannot be ignored in the world literary creation,which can be seen from the awarding of Nobel Literature Prize,Booker Prize and other large literary awards.In the literary creation of ethnic minorities,the concern of cultural identity of the postcolonial female groups has become a hot issue in the present literary research.The postcolonial female group has particularities.They are different from male in the Third World and also different from the white female,which has led to the study of postcolonial female sunk into a long period of blank.Thus,it has more realistic meaning to discuss the construction of the hybrid identity of the colored female immigrants in this paper.