InQuestofHome:ThreeFemaleWriters'NegotiationwithDisplacementintheAgeofGlobalization

• Main Authors: Lee,Yi-yin, 李怡瑩
• Other Authors: Huang,Tsung-yi
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54670327965782076884

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文研究所 === 93 === Globalization has changed people’s understanding of the world seeing that the world has enlarged and involved more places in a more inter-related network. The development of tourism as a global phenomenon brings an impact on people’s home—a place where they, particularly those in the Third World, start to negotiate their displacement in the age of globalization. This thesis contains three female writers’ discourses of home—Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and Francesca Marciano’s Rules of the Wild. This thesis analyzes how their works can be regarded as their respective ways of negotiating their displacement experience. In the first chapter, I analyze how the female narrator in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things re-describes and rethinks people’s relationship in the aspect of performance, and in this way, she intends to problematize her people’s performance of the exotic other to further tourist consumption. I highlight that performance is the process of constituting one’s identity and sense of belongingness. Through reconstructing her family saga, the female narrator thinks more critically of what lies behind performance of all kinds—the pedagogy of the dominant power structure that conducts people’s life but takes their practice to make itself stable. Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place presents an uneven development between local Antiguans and tourists from the Western world. In the second chapter, I argue that by revealing how tourists and their ancestors, colonizers, exploit Antigua, Kincaid unveils the ideology of tourism and composes her own Antiguan discourse. In the third chapter, employing Francesca Marciano’s Rules of the Wild as an example, I intend to demystify the global dream of being at home in the world. By analyzing why the female narrator feels frustrated in making a home in Kenya, I argue that globalization may cause the frenetic longing for a return to old days as if they were all good. Therefore, to prevent a problematic revival of old values, people have to think critically how boundaries, geographical or metaphorical, are broken and redrawn to define their life. I suggest in this thesis that to rethink the politics of home—how home and the sense of belongingness are constructed—provides a way for us to engage and re-position ourselves in the globalizing world.