Ethical Identity Reconstruction and Community Imagination in Gurnah's Dottie

Foreign Literature Studies ›› 2022, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (2): 46-54.

• Studies on the Nobel Prize Winning Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah • Previous Articles Next Articles

Ethical Identity Reconstruction and Community Imagination in Gurnah's Dottie

Huang Hui

Online:2022-04-25 Published:2022-04-29
About author:Huang Hui is a professor at the School of Chinese Language and Literature and a researcher at the International Center for the Study of Ethical Literary Criticism, Central China Normal University (Wuhan 430079, China), specializing in Ethical Literary Criticism and African Literature. Email: huanghui@188.com
Supported by:
“A History of African Literature in English” (19ZDA296) sponsored by the National Social Science Fund of China

Abstract

Abstract: As a representative figure of contemporary diasporic literature, Gurnah has been focusing on the issue of ethical identity reconstruction among diasporic groups in his fiction writing. Taking Dottie's and her two siblings' displacement of ethical identity and ethical dilemma in a multicultural context as the main thread, Gurnah's early novel, Dottie, reveals the diaspora's yearning for subject status and minority groups' common pursuit of ethical identity. At the same time, by examining diasporic groups' psychological trauma and ethical dilemma due to the severe conservative xenophobia and racial discrimination in Postwar Britain, Gurnah not only explores black women's heart-wrenching experience of making ethical choices under the double pressure from historical memories and social realities, but also illustrates their imagination of and search for an ethical community in a multicultural context.

Key words: Gurnah, Dottie, ethical identity, memory, community

Huang Hui. Ethical Identity Reconstruction and Community Imagination in Gurnah's Dottie[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2022, 44(2): 46-54.

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Ethical Identity Reconstruction and Community Imagination in Gurnah's Dottie

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