Diaspora And Home

As an outstanding exponent of Chinese American literature,Maxine Hong Kingston has cast a long shadow over the literary history of the world.Her works have repeatedly topped the bestseller lists,gained a global audience,and garnered widespread social attention.Kingston’s writings contain not only her personal desire to relate her own traumatic experiences and construct the cultural memory of her ethnic community,but also her grand humanistic concern to promote the change of the world’s pluralism in political and cultural contexts and to transcend all boundaries.Kingston’s closing piece,I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,was published in 2011.Condensing 70 years of age into a single long poem,it presents her creative philosophy and imagination of the world,opens for the reader the “broad margin” that has been her life.From the perspective of ecocriticism,this thesis discusses the diasporic identity and homing complex in Kingston’s poetic memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.It reveals how,in the increasing prominence of identity politics,the reaching back to one’s “roots” extends to the universalizing claim to “common humanity” for diaspora as a whole,and how they can recognize the selves in both physical and metaphysical chronotopes,literally imparting a sense of being a “settler” within historical genealogy and destinies.There are five chapters in this thesis.Chapter One provides a brief introduction to Maxine Hong Kingston and her poem I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,sorts out the current status of research on Kingston’s work by scholars at home and abroad,interprets the theoretical framework and presents the thesis statement.Chapter Two begins with Kingston’s home consciousness from natural ecology,analyzing her topophilia and the resultant ecological fantasy of her homeland,unfolding the emotional motivation of the land for the diasporic writing.Chapter Three focuses on Kingston’s peace activism to her appeal to an ecological cosmopolitanism in an effort to present the transformation and coexistence of the diaspora from ethnicity to cosmopolitanism,leaving aside the ideas of fixity,boundedness,and exclusivity traditionally implied by the word “home” in diaspora.Chapter Four investigates Kingston’s epiphany of home in the ecological self,where she stays true to Chinese roots,faces up to the present,achieves a reconciliation with herself in the collision of Eastern and Western concepts of time,and poetically dwells in the Anwesenheit of spirituality and history.Chapter Five sums up the main ideas in each chapter.On this basis,it indicates the practical significance of delivering research on the close integration of diaspora and home writing with ecological thoughts in I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.All in all,Chinese Americans and other ethnic minorities need to both challenge the homogenized discourse of the West and renounce their psychological precautions to embrace a reawakening of self,ethnicity and the world in order to catch their flesh and soul.The effective fusion of nature and life experience in I Love a Broad Margin to My Life establishes a broader basis of ecocriticism,through which human beings can gain a better insight into the relations among man,nature and culture at large.