Identity Construction In Diaspora

With the influence brought by colonialism, immigration and globalization, the more complicated identity in crisis gradually replaces class, rapidly developing into a central issue in many fields of humanities and social sciences. Accordingly, identity construction becomes an important theme of modern literature, especially literature of ethnic minorities and diaspora. Middlesex is just such a novel that is influenced by current literary thoughts.Setting the novel in the vision of diaspora, adopting related theories about narrative discourse and identity, the thesis takes the Greek family of the novel in diaspora as its studying object to explore the efforts the diaspora make in their pursuit of compromised identities in terms of religion, gender, ethnicity and politics as well as the uniqueness they show during the process. By creating Cal, a split protagonist, Eugenides probes into the tensile force confronted by the immigrants and their descendants between preservation of original Greek culture and integration into the American culture. At the same time, the novel reflects the struggles the protagonists make to keep balance and unity, and also offers a possible third place rather than the betweenness for these postmodernist diaspora in cultural hybridity.The introduction traces the biographical and critical contexts of Eugenides' Middlesex and introduces the originality—diaspora. Chapter One examines the evolution of the concept of identity and the characters' quest for identity. Chapter Two explores the novel from the internal perspective, studying the construction of different identities through narrative discourse. Chapter Three concentrates on the external studies, exploring the identity crisis confronted by diaspora in cultural hybridity. The conclusion sums up diaspora's final choice as well as the relationship between identity construction, narrative discourse and cultural hybridity.