My paper explores the uses of non-standard English and “contaminated” English in the poetry and fiction of Canadian “ethnic” writers, including those of Chinese and Japanese origin. I am concentrating on a limited number of typical cases to demonstrate how writers increasingly use, in addition to standard Canadian English, dialects and ideolects which are influenced by the languages of their respective ethnic groups, Jewish, German, Ukrainian, Italian, Chinese, etc.), and even of other ethnic minorities. This is, of course, a phenomenon also known in French-Canadian writing and writing in English by the North American natives; both groups are usually, for political reasons, not classified as “ethnic minorities.” It is also apparent in writings by Latino or Chicano writers in the USA. More broadly, this phenomenon has been encountered and investigated in many of the studies of the uses of English and French around the world: in the Muslim Maghreb and in previous sub-Saharan colonies, for example; in the Carribean; in South and Southeast Asia, for example Singapore.

While the “migratory subject” has been condemned for selling out one’s homeland, participating in the process of “upward racial mobility” and perpetuating the hegemony of the West, Stuart Hall celebrates this subject as a “pedagogical figure” whose “hybridity”opens up new possibilities to the world. Migratory experience makes clear in any event the need for inter-cultural translation. Using Nadine Gordimer’s recent novel The Pickup (2001) as an exemplifying text, this paper proposes to explore the migratory experience as that of “the stranger” who comes from elsewhere, from“there” and not “here,” interpreting this in terms of post-colonial “location,” “dislocation,” and “relocation.” Characters in The Pickup fluctuate between South Africa and the Arab world, between the Arabian desert and the promised lands of America and Australia. Their home is “deterritorialized,” not as a geographically fixed locus but as a psychological habitus shifting from place to place. Yet in a sense we all have become migratory subjects; in this post-colonial era we all need to think of ourselves as beyond the home, beyond the nation.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki of Japanese parents, but he grew up in Britain with a British education. Considered a very successful “British” writer and identifying himself as a “British” national, Ishiguro often receives praise for his “Japanese” style. Although much of his writing revolves around Britain and Japan, he is also a writer whose vision extends to other countries in Europe and, most recently, Shanghai. For all these reasons, Ishiguro prefers to call himself an “international” writer communicating in the English language. Nations are “imagined communities” answering to Western perceptions of world order. International activities have homogenized the world by creating a “global” culture. But, can a global identity really replace our present national identities? Should it? And, if it does, will it only be the re-establishment of yet another Western concept? Anthony D. Smith’s four categories of nationalism include: ethnicity, culture, politics and ideology. Mike Featherstone presents global culture in terms of five visions: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. If the need for national identities reflected the cultural confrontations that occurred at the colonial peripheries, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, will the emergence of a global identity answer to the postcolonial problems that we have created for ourselves? It is undeniable that present definitions of national identity rely not only on solidarity within, but also on contrasts with the “outside.” If the self cannot exist without the other, the inside without the outside, the civilized without the barbaric and the center without the periphery, how is global formation going to be possible without external defining coordinates? This paper shall explore the meaning of belonging to and identifying with a nation. It will use the ideas of homelessness and orphanhood portrayed in When We Were Orphans to look at how individuals relate to their nations and how those nations interrelate to create, and sometimes also destroy, the imagination of a larger community. Since Ishiguro belongs to a nation that is becoming truly multi-ethnic and he writes in the most widely used language in the world, his early career in internationalist writing should rightly be seen as pioneering the global identity.

This paper attempts to explore the issues of global hybridization and diasporic subjects in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The concept that globalization is a homogeneous process will be interrogated and I will concentrate on the discussion of the cultural translation of the global diasporic immigrants and their reconfiguration of “culture” and “identity formation” in the global context. In the process of globalization, cultures and individual identities undergo a series of “translations.” These are exemplified by Rushdie’s global immigrants, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Fraishta; the former is transformed into a satanic creature and then into something like “chimera craft,” while the latter is translated into an angel, hovering between reality and illusion. Adopting Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity and cultural translation as well as Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s concept of “globalization as hybridization,” I examine the thematic of global hybridization as Rushdie’s alternative strategy against nationalist and cultural homogeneity. Then, drawing examples from The Satanic Verses, I argue that the “cultural translation” of Saladin and Gibreel embodies two kinds of encounters with “globalization” in the global city of London. The unique global vision emerging from Rushdie’s text suggests that cultures are hybridized in the global context, and global hybridization creates cultural diversity and flexibility. A mélange of diverse languages, “time-space,” race, class, cultures and religions are delicately compressed in Rushdie’s globalized world, whether in metropolitan England or in the Indian subcontinent. I will explore the indigenization of global cultural forms through the example of Gibreel’s hybridized songs. And through Stuart Hall’s vision of global diaspora, I argue that Saladin’s route to the recognition of hybrid Indian cultures is important for the relocation of immigrant subjectivity. While Gibreel’s tragic suicide indicates the failure of a diasporic subject to change or slow the process of globalization, Saladin’s return to Bombay to experience the “eclectic” hybridized cultures inherent within the indigenous Indian artistic tradition suggests a revision of global hybridization. The alternative insight in The Satanic Verses is that globalization leads to the production of new identities and to cultural hybridity, bringing newness and vitality to the encounter of the global and the local.

Derek Walcotts Pantomime (1978), an adaptation of the colonialist novel Robinson Crusoe, is a mimic text. In this paper Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity are employed to analyze how Walcott in Pantomime subverts and appropriates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to construct post-colonial subjectivity. Focusing on the postcolonial politics of changing roles between the master and the servant in the play, I analyze the way Walcott employs colonial mimicry as a means of exposing the duplicity of colonial authority and the possibility of constructing a Caribbean identity. Such destabilizing/destabilized colonial mimicry in Walcott's anti-imperial writing can help create what Homi K. Bhabha terms “the Third Space” within which post-colonial agency can possibly be effected.

The themes of family ritual and social duty are the main cultural motifs of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s nineteenth-century British novel. In this narrative, the British cultural emphasis on dignity and duty is on full display. Sense and Sensibility tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, who struggle to find suitable marriages to insure their social position after the death of their father leaves their financial prospects uncertain. Suddenly forced to rely on the kindness of relations, the question of marriage takes on a new urgency for them both. Representing “sense” in the form of strict adherence to duty and social custom is Elinor, who is very proper and guarded in affairs of the heart, while Marianne’s romantic sensibility guides her heart and her impetuous actions through a painful process of self-discovery. By the end of the narrative, each sister finds a balance within herself—Elinor opens up and becomes vulnerable to her romantic sensibility, while Marianne gains a new guiding sense which grounds her without compromising her zest for life. The struggle faced by the Dashwood sisters, while localized to a British setting, has universal implications. The rigorous moral, intellectual, and religious structures of nineteenth-century British society—family rituals, social customs, codes of decent behavior, adherence to duty—are the rich comic territory of Jane Austen’s Britain. These themes take on a universal significance in the hands of Ang Lee, who directed a film version of Jane Austen's narrative in 1996. The chief cultural principle in evidence in this film, dignity, is central to Victorian England and to Ang Lee’s previous works. Although the story is two hundred years old and from a remote setting and period, it has a timelessness and universality which Ang Lee brings to the screen, proving the director an apt observer of global cultural codes of behavior.

Today the forward momentum of a proliferating, globalizing neo-liberal capitalism is in full swing, and nothing in sight will slow it down (not even the violent protests at WTO meetings). But the notion that globalization also means Americanization in significant ways—as many bitterly complain, though others may welcome it with open arms—is hardly a new one. Satirical American novels began to warn us more than half a century ago about an emerging process of globalization driven by uniquely American forces, even if, back in the 1920s and 1930s, globalization was still a kind of speculation about the direction of the future based upon trends at that time. This paper looks at two novels from the period, Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, in order to show how they satirized the logic of globalization, revealing it to be an imposition of contradictory American trends. While the emerging process of globalization is much more complex than these (now “classical”) satires indicate, such novels still provide a prescient insight into our dominant contemporary condition, and also suggest the shape of a still-emerging future.

In the last century, America has witnessed the nurturing and development of multicultural theater as a place for revealing the painful history of racial and ethnic relations and migrations. In the plays of emerging multicultural of “ethnic” playwrights we find the attempt to forge new identities for themselves, especially in late twentieth-century America, as well as the attempt to discover ways of reaching out across cultures in order to build intercultural harmony and understanding. The diasporic or migratory experience portrayed in these plays in a sense parallels the more universal contemporary experience of globalization, and thus is marked by the features of disembedding, deterritorialization and hybridization. These issues are addressed in the plays of African-American playwrights (Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Charles Smith), Hispanic American playwrights (Luis Valdez, Silvia Gonzalez, Migdalia Cruz), and Asian-American playwrights (Philip Kan Gotanda, Frank Chin, David Henry Hwang). Here I will examine the migrant experience of disembedding, deterritorialization and hybridization as we find it in David Henry Hwang's As the Crow Flies.

This paper investigates the reception of the major Pre-Raphaelites in relation to cultural changes in May Fourth China. Translated poems, criticism, and reproduced paintings are examined, as well as the Pre-Raphaelites’ own letters, diaries, journals and manuscripts, in order to contextualize their writing and gain insight into their lives. By first understanding the impact of the major Pre-Raphaelites on literary practices within the social, cultural, and artistic milieu of Victorian England, we can more clearly see their impact on May Fourth China in relation to such key aspects of Chinese modernity as love, freedom, and decadence. This paper argues that Chinese writers received the Pre-Raphaelites with a kind of patriarchal sentimentality.

This essay focuses on reading Tang Xianzu, a prominent Chinese playwright in the Ming dynasty, as a Nietzschean “übermensch.” The controversial term “superman,” once misunderstood as connoting immoralism, nihilism and violence, will be re-investigated in terms of Walter Kaufmann’s rendering as “overman.” This refers to an inner superior man who, without blindly following canonized beliefs, further overcomes illusory individual desires through artistic creation. Nietzsche's defiant philosophy of the übermensch will be paralleled to Tang’s unconventional philosophy of qingzhi, which I interpret as a philosophy of self-transformation through love. I will discuss the similarities in their philosophies, their non-dualistic worldviews, and their conceptions of art as the most fundamental way of justifying our illusory and absurd life. Relevant historical and biographical evidence will also be used to support the thesis that the playwright Tang underwent a spiritual transformation from a chivalrous Neo-Confucianist to a “philosophical” rather than “religious” Daoist, one who devotes himself to the unorthodox southern drama to justify his illusory life, which again has obvious parallels with the Nietzschean notion of the übermensch.