In Search Of Cultural Identity

Native Son is one of the most influential novels written by Richard Wright,positively reflecting the resentment and resistance of the bottom black people under the oppression of the white mainstream culture. The black, as an unwilling immigrant group, are separated from the traditional African culture; simultaneously, they are unable to assimilate into white mainstream culture. Black people’s search for cultural identity involved in the work is an important topic in today’s world, and it’s also the research subject studied in the thesis.After analyzing the relevant domestic and foreign studies about Native Son, the author finds that few people study the work from Bhabha’s post-colonial perspective.Different from those papers, the particularity and complexity of black people are interpreted based on Bhabha’s theory and the failure of black people’s search for cultural identity is also analyzed in the thesis.Based on Bhabha’s relevant theories, the thesis studies black people’s identity crisis, the causes and their efforts in the white society. The author analyzes the specialty of the black ethnic identity, and studies the causes of the black identity crisis from two aspects, namely, the black’s own attitude towards alien culture and the contradiction of alien culture. The author also discusses the hardships of black community’s search for the “third space” in the condition of rejecting both the black and white cultures by describing black people’s failure in their search for individual identities and collective identities. The final conclusion is that competition and integration among cultures are inevitable in today’s multi-cultural world. If a nation wants to get a place in the society dominated by the alien culture, its people have to recognize the excellence of native culture and absorb the merits of the alien culture at the same time. Only by combining the native and the alien cultures, can they seek the living space in the cultural conflicts and finally find their own cultural identities.