A Postcolonial Analysis On Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman

Louise Erdrich(1954-)is one of the famous and prolific Native American Indian novelists,poets and children literature writers with abundant works.Most of the current studies on Erdrich’s work focus on her writing style or dispersed analysis of her novels which are usually composed with outdated materials,such as her novels written in the last century.This study,guided by the postcolonial theory of Said,Spivak,and Homi Bhabha,aims to explore how Native Americans become the“Other”,how the Native Americans construct their identities based on Erdrich’s Native American-US binary cultural experience and how her feminist opinion take shape through the analysis of her latest novel The Night Watchman,a Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction in 2021.From encounters of characters in the novel,this study abstracts Erdrich’s mindset to postcolonialism and discusses how her mindset is reflected in the novel,thereby discloses her consciousness of anti-colonialism and her resistance to colonial power discourse.This study discovers that,invaded by the White society,Native American’s living conditions and identity had changed dramatically.They once were the owner of their land,but their identity was forced into the Other in the White society.Their living style,economy,politics,and many other aspects were all controlled by the white people,resulting in the loss of their voice.In the meantime,Native American women had become the “subaltern of subaltern” due to the oppression from the White mainstream culture and the patriarchal social structure.They were the liminal group,their voice being further suppressed.White cultural infiltration had also generated the hybrid identity of Native Americans.Erdrich passes out her core implication through the novel: no matter in which country or region,in order to resist White colonialism,one must cherish history and tradition.People from certain ethnic minority groups must unite and regain the power to discourse,thus surviving in the postcolonial world while retaining their own culture.To free themselves from patriarchal oppression,women in the ethnic minority should think and act independently,make their voices heard while resisting colonial hegemony together with men in the ethnic minority.