On The Racial Transgression And Reconstruction Of Subjectivity In My Son's Story

Nadine Gordimer is a prominent contemporary South African white writer,and her works have won numerous important literature awards which include the Nobel Prize of 1991,the Booker Prize and the CAN Award which is South Africa's most important literary award.However,her works are insufficiently studied in Chinese academia if we take the prestige and fertility of the writer into consideration.As the novel nominated for the Nobel Prize,My Son's Story has received more and more attention over the recent years.And the current studies on this novel either merely focus on the narrative techniques employed,or explore the embodiment of Gordimer's identity as a post-colonial writer in depicting the living predicaments of the characters under apartheid on the basis.of post-colonial theory.But these researches pay little attention to the positive influences of the fights in the formation of the subjectivity of the black people.In view of this,based on the racial transgressions of the black people resisting against the apartheid,this dissertation explores how the black people reconstruct the subjectivity through the political awakening and the deconstruction of the white culture.Besides,racial transgression is subdivided into the spatial transgression and the cultural transgression of the black people in this paper.This dissertation is composed of five chapters in all.Chapter One introduces Nadine Gordimer,her work My Son 's Story and the research status both at home and abroad,states the research purpose and structure.Chapter Two focuses on the black people's spatial transgression as well as the political awakening embodied in these actions.According to the analysis,the geographical transgression of the black people is a more explicit and obvious way of fighting against the apartheid.The black people also challenge the binary opposition between the black and the white in a more implicit way through the metaphorical spatial transgression.Chapter Three mainly analyzes the cultural transgression of the black people and the deconstruction of the authority of the white culture from the perspective of post-colonial theories.Firstly,through appropriating the white language English,to some extent,the black people are able to restore the long-absent voice and rewrite the black history.Secondly,the novel exposes the hypocrisy of the creed of equality and universal love in Christianity through the depictions of the racial oppression and violence.The novel also shows that the white literary classics are incapable of providing a way out for the blacks who are stuck in the existing predicaments,which results in the disenchantment of the white literature.Chapter Four mainly explores the reconstruction of the black subjectivity in the novel.In the aspect of black males,Sonny and Will adopt different strategies to achieve the reconstruction as the former employs the hybrid strategy to deconstruct the opposition between the civilized and the uncivilized while the latter utters his voice and shows his presence by embarking on self-writing.In the aspect of black females,Aila and Baby have established brand-new images of the black female fighters in the revolutionary South Africa by subverting the stereotypes and the mysterious oriental "Other".Chapter Five is the conclusion.The conclusion points out that the fight of the Sonny family is the epitome of the black community in South Africa.From the perspective of the little black boy Will,the novel has realistically represented the tough process of the black people's resistance against the apartheid and reconstruction of the subjectivity.The black history is rewritten by the blacks themselves at the same time.It has also provided some fighting experiences and insights to the still-oppressed blacks,so as to facilitate the liberation of South Africa.