Space,ethnicity,and Culture

As one of the ethnic writers in Australia,Brian Castro(1950-)has published eleven novels as well as a great volume of essays on creative writing so far.His book After China focuses on the complex reality of transnational migration,“self” and“otherness”,and cultural identity;another book Shanghai Dancing is a brilliant meditation on autobiographical space,transethnic encounter,and cosmopolitan memory by tracing the protagonist's wanderings among his Chinese,Australian,and European families.The characters' cross-border phenomena and cross-border texts in the above two novels draw spatial,ethnic,and cultural comparisons.The thesis consists of five parts in all.The first part provides a brief introduction of Brian Castro's life and his works After China and Shanghai Dancing,gives an elaborate account of the critical studies at home and abroad,and sets forth the overall theoretical framework and the layout of the thesis.The second part focuses on the spatial border crossing in After China and Shanghai Dancing.Based on concrete and abstract spatial border construction,this thesis explores the protagonist's(You Bok Mun)migrating experiences from China to Australia and his struggle for living space in After China.In light of cross-border texts,Shanghai Dancing is widely accepted as a work of fictional autobiography.The fusion of fact and fiction in the novel is observed based on Lejeune's theory of“autobiographical space”.And the protagonist(António Castro)as a diaspora,in quest of a spiritual home,continually finds himself in a liminal space,where he has to deal with the problem of identity.The third part highlights how Brian Castro as an “ethnic writer” defies the power of ethnic categorization in his novels.After China indicates an apparent resistance to national polities of place and ethnic classification,which somehow makes a feature of ethnic literature: the binary of “self” and “otherness” may sometimes be obfuscated in his characters regardless of their completely different social and cultural background.In Shanghai Dancing,Brian Castro explores the unequal relationships between the multiethnic or “hybrid” people and the dominant ethnicity.Through the ethnic cross-border experiences of António Castro's family members,he reveals the irrationality and illegitimacy of racial and ethnic categorization.Part four is concerned with the cultural border crossing in Brian Castro's novels.In After China,literary personae are placed within the context of a globalizedparadigm as postmodern individuals,whose cross-border movements between two cultures are frequently made through their engagement in the transnational and cosmopolitan activities.The novel is also deeply concerned with culturally cross-border texts,which is evident in the juxtaposition of Eastern philosophers and Western thinkers.In Shanghai Dancing,the collection of various records of family histories constructs the cosmopolitan memory across cultures in the novel.Moreover,in Brian Castro's opinion,languages function as the carrier of cultures;therefore,in Shanghai Dancing,Brian Castro endows his characters with the characteristics of polyglots,through whom readers witness the characters' multilingual adventures in transcultural settings.The last part is a conclusion,which puts forward that the thesis explores Brian Castro's contribution to cross-cultural communication through the revealing of his ability to be an ethnic cross-border writer for his masterly employment of cross-border phenomena and cross-border texts in After China and Shanghai Dancing.