Existence In Liminality: An Interpretation Of A Mercy From The Prespective Of Homi K.Bhabha's Postcolonial Theory

Toni Morrison is one of the banner African American women writers in literature,and in 1988,she won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for Beloved.She was the first African American woman of any nationality to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993,her novels focus on race and ethnicity.Instead of the opposing relationship between minority and colonizer,such as conflicts between the white and the black,she pays much attention to the issues of gender,class,and other issues in black communities.A Mercy is Morrison's ninth novel,and it was selected as one of “Ten Best Books of 2008” by “The New York Times”.The historical background of A Mercy is in the preliminary stage of the North American colonies,when different races and different identities coexisted in the North American continent.A Mercy tells the growth of Florens,Lina,and Sorrow,and also tells their tragic fate.Postcolonialism is a literary theory for cultural analysis,which focuses on the relationship among different cultures.This thesis will analyze the identity problem from the perspective of Homi K.Bhabha's postcolonial theory of three characters in A Mercy,the aim is to find out three characters' living spaces.The thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is an introduction to the novel,the author of the novel,and postcolonialism.The second chapter mainly focuses on the other question in the aspects on family and mainstream society.Among different cultures,the cultural clash is unavoidable,it is also one of the cause of ‘the other',which is the identity of minority,this is the content of the third chapter.Due to the clashes and differences between characters' cultures and the mainstream culture,I will use theconcept of hybridity to find out different meanings of liminality and the hybrid existence of the three characters.The last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis.