On Hybridity In The Ancestor Game

Australian literature is a new rising literature. Initialed from the colonial period (1788-1890), it has its own unique features and has contributed to the world a number of excellent litterateurs, among whom Alex Miller is an outstanding one. Because of the publication of his outstanding novel The Ancestor Game, Miller was given four literature awards, which were Miles Franklin Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Pacific Writers Award, and Federal Writers Association Award. From then on, Miller became a quick rising star and has been a prominent writer in Australian literature. The novel The Ancestor Game tells a story about four generations'immigrants'life of Feng's family in Australia. It starts from the colonial area of New South Wales of Australia in the Gold Rush period in the 1850's, to Chinese cities Shanghai and Hangzhou in the eve of Anti Japanese War, finally to cosmopolitan Melbourne in 1950's.The narrator, Steven Muir, an Australian-Scottish writer, is attracted by the complicated origins of Lang Tzu, an Australian-Chinese art teacher who commits suicide. Steven thus embarks on a journey of discovery to search for the identity of his friend Lang and the history of the latter's ancestry. In a sense, the novel is about the life of immigrants.The immigrants in Australia are enchanted by their homeland, miss the hometown over bank, but they do not choose to escape from a homesick emotion, instead they faced to it with courage. In it,from the insider-outsider perspective, Miller offers a positive alternative to immigrants that is to live a double life. This coincides with Miller's own identity who migrates to Australia from England.This thesis, therefore, attempts to study the post-colonial features of the novel. It mainly borrows the concept of the theorist Homi K. Bhabha's hybridity and displacement. After a careful analysis of the main characters and their double life in the novel; after exploring the connection between the past and present and ancestors and descendents; and then after looking at the plurality in terms of narration and culture, the thesis argues that the novel reaches a kind of hybridity in the above three aspects. It thus concludes that the author Miller seems to redefine multi-culture and its meaning and at the same time offer a positive alternative to immigrants. This is especially meaningful in a global world today.After a study of multiple culture features in modern Australia, Miller seems to think that the author re-defines Australian and Chinese culture on the basis of mutual respect, and weights on a consolidation of different individuals. And this is an attitude coming from the author which coincides with the post-colonialist criticism. The novel also involves information of the multiple culture structure's direction in the development of Australian culture.