Oppression And Resistance

Monica Ali(1967-)is an outstanding representative of the British minority literary writers.Her first novel Brick Lane was a remarkable success after its publication in 2003.In this novel,Ali takes the Bengali girl Nazneen's life as the main plot line and describes the real living conditions of Bengali immigrants in London.Meanwhile,the conditions of Nazneen's sister Hasina and other women in Bangladesh run throughout the novel as the sub-line.There is a sharp contrast between the modern,flourishing London and the poor,backward Bengali community.The differences and clashes between different races and genders are acutely felt.In such a context,the novel reveals some characters' struggles and resistance as members of the “subaltern” group.“Subaltern” is one of the key concepts in the post-colonial studies.It was first coined by Antonio Gramsci,an Italian Communist.Later,the Indian Subaltern Studies Group and one of its members Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak adopted the concept and applied it to a wider postcolonial context.In this context,subaltern designates the populations which are deprived of discourse power and are suppressed by hegemonic political power.They have different statuses and experiences in different social stratums.And faced with oppression,they also adopt different strategies of resistance.Engaging subaltern studies,this thesis looks into Brick Lane and endeavors to prove that though subalterns cannot speak for themselves because of oppression,it doesn't mean that they don't have spirits of resistance.And subalterns' strategies of resistance can be successful when they take the external living environment and their own internal conditions into consideration.The thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter gives a brief introduction of Monica Ali and Brick Lane,and a review of the studies on the novel.It also contains a brief exposition of the concept of subaltern as well as the structure and significance of this thesis.Chapter Two explores the survival dilemmas the subalterns in Brick Lane have suffered,including the racial discrimination caused by the western mainstream culture and the oppression from the patriarchal system.Chapter Three analyzes the strategies of resistance adopted by male and female subalterns respectively to get out of their dilemmas.Chapter Four explains both external and internal conditions are very important for subalterns to get out of dilemmas.They should take all of them into consideration.The last chapter concludes that though subalterns are in a marginalized and oppressed situation and they cannot speak for themselves,they still have great power to find the true self and achieve self-realization with proper strategies.