全球化、混杂化与跨文化主体性之建构——读《红色泥土与倾盆大雨》

Globalization, Hybridization and Construction of Transcultural Subjectivity:Reading Red Earth and Pouring Rain

维克拉姆·钱德拉是一位穿梭于东西方之间的当代印度流散作家。作为一个兼具地区性和世界性的作家,他将扎根于口头文化传统的印度文化的本质特征与其作品世界性的一面相结合。其第一部小说《红色泥土与倾盆大雨》具有套盒式叙事结构,由数百个交织讲述、重讲、复制、翻译和穿插的故事构成,给读者提供了"故事中的故事"或者是"关于故事讲述的故事讲述"。在这部具有复杂故事结构、混杂叙事模式和多元文化色彩的小说中,他为我们呈现了全球化的漫长历史,描述了一种多元文化和多种语言混杂的印度社会,同时也探讨了与文化适应和文化互化过程相关的混杂化和跨文化主体性这一问题。

As a contemporary Indian diasporic writer shuttling between the East and the West, Vikram Chandra is regarded both regional and cosmopolitan, one who combines the essential nature rooted in Indian oral cultural tradition with the cosmopolitan aspect of his writings.His first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain has a Chinese-box-like narrative structure, composed of hundreds of interwoven stories that are told, retold, copied, translated, and interspersed.It provides readers with "stories within a story" or "storytelling about storytelling." In such a novel with complicated structure, hybrid narrative mode and multicultural hue, the novelist presents to us a long history of globalization and hybridized multicultural and multilingual Indian society while exploring such issues of hybridity and transcultural subjectivity as related to acculturation and transculturation.