A Study Of Cultural Identity In The English Patient From The Perspective Of Homi Bhabha’s Post-colonial Theory

In today’s world,with the rapid development of globalization,the number of transnational corporations,immigrants and tourists grows quickly,which has led to frequent exchanges of cultures.But at the same time,many serious questions come along,such as anxiety about cultural identity,environmental issues,immigration issues,racial discrimination.The exchange,integration and confrontation among cultures mark the formation of the world community of culture,and the issue of cultural identity has also become a worldwide hot issue,which has received widespread attention.As one of the most famous contemporary post-colonial theorists,Homi Bhabha is significant with his concepts and works in studying post-colonial literature.The concepts of“The Third Space”,“Hybridity” and “Mimicry”,which he studied and developed,have provided us with a brand-new way for accurately understanding the relationship between cultures and rightly figuring out our own cultural identity in this multicultural world.Therefore,it has great contemporary meaningfulness to analyze the culture relations between different nations and people’s cultural identity during the colonial period.The English Patient is the representative works of the well-known writer Michael Ondaatje who was called “writer without borders”.His experiences of living in different countries made him confuse about his cultural identity,and it greatly influenced his creation so that the characters in his works all suffered from their cultural identity and they always made efforts to purse the sense of belonging in foreign countries.This novel perfectly shows his thoughts.Based on Bhabha’s four post-colonial concepts: Hybridity,Ambivalence,Mimicry,and the Third Space,this paper attempts to solve the following three research questions:1.How is Almasy’s and Kip’s cultural identity represented in The English Patient from the perspective of Bhabha’s post-colonial theory?2.What are the possible causes for the dilemma of cultural identity in Almasy and Kip?3.What are the strategies for reconstructing cultural identity?Employing Bhabha’s postcolonial theory to analyze Almasy’s and Kip’s hybridity and ambivalence in their cultural identity,their mimicry in English culture and the process of establishing the third space in cultures,this thesis holds that the reasons that affect Almasy’s and Kip’s cultural identity can be divided into two aspects: external causes and internal causes.The external causes include historical factor,economic factor and cultural factor.The internal causes include family factor,educational factor and religious factor.In addition,this paper puts forward three strategies for reconstructing cultural identity,namely,accepting cultural hybridity,mimicking other cultures and building the third space in cultures,which will inspire people to rightly treat the differences between native culture and foreign cultures and correctly position their own cultural identity.