想象“他者”与“他者”想象——现当代英国流散文学与英国国家身份构建

Imagining the Other and the Other’s Imagining:Modern and Contemporary British Diasporic Literature and the Construction of the British National Identity

英国作家的个人创作与英国国家身份的构建密不可分。英国国家身份的构建是一个想象"他者"和"他者"想象的内外兼修的过程。早期英国作家想象"他者"的艺术与政治表达制造了适合帝国躯体的"国家的皮肤"。以想象"他者"为主旨的英国文学创作实现了对"他者"的认知暴力和妖魔化,达到了从"他者"获取力量用以构建英国国家自我身份的目的。大英帝国末期与后殖民时期,以不同于本土英国人的"他者"身份进行创作的现当代英国流散作家分别借用中世纪骑士文化和新历史主义写作方式试图将英国塑造成需要保护的"仙后"和"英联邦"多元文化的主题公园。

British writers’personal writings are inseparable from the construction of the British national identity.The construction of the British national identity is at once an internal and external process,in which the"Other"is both the subject and object of imagining.Early British writers’art and political expression in imagining the"Other"produced a"skin of the nation"fit for the body of the empire.The British literary writings that are primarily intended for imagining the"Other"facilitated the epistemic violence against and the demonization of the"Other"so as to accomplish the purpose of establishing the British national identity with the force gleaned from the"Other".During the final phase of the British Empire and the postcolonial period,modern and contemporary British diasporic writers,who wrote with an identity of the"Other",one that differs from a native British,employed,respectively,the medieval concepts of knighthood and the methods of neo-historical cultural criticism in an attempt to construct Britain as the"fairy queen"who needs protection and the theme park of multiculturalism.