Seeking Identities Across The Worlds-A Critical Analysis Of Ang Lee's Film The Wedding Banquet

Nowadays, Cultural Studies has been aspired to be an important academic discipline and exercised a large influence on English studies, media, sociology and communication studies. Within this context, the question of identity has moved to the forefront of research and academic discourse, especially the exploration of cultural identity from the perspective of diaspora in cross-cultural world. Based on this approach, this thesis picks up the Chinese English film The Wedding Banquet as an exemplification, aims to transcend the previous understandings in the surface structure of the cultural difference and the cultural clash, and provides an interpretation of cultural identity politics of the immigrants.In the film The Wedding Banquet, the protagonists' identities are fragmented as the coming of the joyous parents comes from Taiwan for the wedding. Through the explicit portrayal of the cultural differences and attitudes towards the wedding event and protagonists' sexual orientations, the film exhibits the confrontation and compatibility between the Oriental and Occidental culture. In the cultural field, it is a battle between the American Orientalism and Chinese Sinization ideologies, while for the individual subject, it is more as the confrontation between the past cultural memory and present cultural identification in subjectivity. This exploration of identity can help us to understand the exilic essence of the immigrants' identity. For the immigrants, identity is always floating and travelling, without a final destination, except some temporary location. The happy ending of the film could be viewed as the "hybridization" of cultural recognition and as the ultimate solution to the identity problem and the Chinese-American cultural confrontation.