The Literary Construction of Identity: A Comparative Study of Chinese Americans and the British Chinese

In the context of global transformations, the analysis of cultural production can be a fruitful way of eviscerating the complex negotiations of identity construction for what Stuart Hall calls ‘new ethnicities’ (1988). The sociological study of creative literature is an area that has been little explored and holds the possibility of offering significant insights into the strategies and ideologies of identity. This chapter offers a comparative study of contemporary Chinese American and British Chinese literature to uncover how the processes of identity construction in narrative fiction are shaped by their different national and political contexts