الفهرس 
PrefaceOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
this thesis will examine the extant dialogism between the totalizing discourse of the mainstream and the subverting discourse of ethnic minorities, from both a Bakhtinian standpoint and postcolonial theory through analyzing three selected Chinese American novels: The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), Shanghai Girls (2009) and Everything I Never Told You (2014).
Chapter one, entitled ”Theoretical Foregrounding: Border-Crossings between Ethnic Literature and Bakhtinian Theory”, will provide a theoretical link between the two theories: Bakhtin’s theories and postcolonial theory to reveal the credibility of the former in the study of ethnic identity. Thus, Bakhtin’s significant conceptions such as dialogism, heteroglossia, chronotope, and carnival may be said to find a renewed force in tackling identity theories. The chapter will start off by defining identity in the light of identity theories, and then will show how dynamic and responsive it is to any social system change. As a dialogic cultural manifestation, identity’s relationship with the individual and society will be highlighted, bringing about the two concepts of in-groupness and out-groupness. The chapter will then bring to light ethnic identity as a component subjected to interactions and sometimes disputes with other ethnicities. In a multi-cultural society, ethnic identities and discourses are dialogically set against each other producing a more elaborate shape of both the ethnic group and the multi-ethnic society.
Chapter two, entitled ”Chronotopic Displacement in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter”, is devoted to illustrate the impact of time and space in shaping human identity and the result of being deracinated from time/history and space/homeland. Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, through providing two stories: a Chinese story and an American one, produces various dynamic relationships between space and time. It is noteworthy to mention that Amy Tan, born in 1952, is a Chinese American writer who has written several novels, including The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and The Valley of Amazement (2013). The chapter will spotlight that the Chinese American novel lends itself to Bakhtin’s chronotopic theory, since ethnic literature deals with the theme of spatial and temporal loss and displacement. Chapter three, entitled ”Carnivalistic Ambivalence in Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls”, will demonstrate different shifts of ambivalent identity in a cosmopolitan society, in both Chinese and American contexts. Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls will provide a detailed story of the immigration experience by portraying life in early-twentieth-century Shanghai until its destruction by the Japanese invasion. Lisa See, born in 1955, is an American writer and novelist of Chinese origin. See wrote several books and novels mainly tackling Chinese culture, such as On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), and The Island of Sea Women (2019). The chapter will trace Bakhtin’s carnivalesque through the theme of the mask embodied in cosmopolitanism in the neo-imperial era.Chapter four, entitled ”Double-voiced Otherness in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You”, will construct double voices or double identities about the same self. Everything I Never Told You, Ng’s first novel, presents an embodiment of Chinese and American blending through a mixed-race marriage and the consequences of such a combination. Celeste Ng, born in 1980, is a Chinese-American novelist, editor and essayist. Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017) is adapted as a television series. Ethnic identity will be displayed, in this chapter, as an entity comprising a split: a Chinese half and an American one. Double-voiced otherness will propose bearing two different voices/identities, each of which converses with the other.