A Post-colonialist Interpretation Of Male Characters In The Bonesetter’s Daughter

This thesis is a literary and cultural interpretation of male characters in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter--- a representative of Chinese-American literature in the perspective of post-colonialist theory which arose in the late 1970 s. The close reading of the literary text and contextual reading of cultural studies are applied to analyze the Chinese American male characters and the construction of their masculinity to reveal the political and historical reasons, especially the impact of American racial and ethnic policy on the masculinity construction.This thesis mainly presents the construction of characterization of Chinese male characters in two periods --the racial stage and ethnic stage of American society, and discusses the social, historical and legal factors in the formation of these male character in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the fact that domestic racial oppression of the American mainstream on the local ethnic minorities, especially on Chinese Americans still exists in the United States. The oppression reflected in literary works, is the false description of the Chinese male characters with racism, orientalism, and demonism and it takes different forms in different periods. At the racial stage, the oppression is explicit, in the form of laws and national policies and "marginalization "of ethnic minorities in cultural discourse. And at the ethnic stage, the oppression is implicit under the disguise of multiculturalism. Finally it can be concluded that the ethnic minorities in the multicultural American society is no longer confronted with the public colonialism, but the new colonialism which is intangible and more difficult to identify. However, in the new period, Chinese American writers have made some resistance to the discourse hegemony of American mainstream society, which is represented in Chinese American literature and leads to the great changes of characterization of Chinese male characters. Their characterization turns to be more real, more actual with the gradual improvement of Chinese living condition in America. Then the readers will have a better understanding of Chinese male characters and their great contribution to the history of the United States.