Breaking the Silence: an Analysis of The Joy Luck Club from the Perspective of Postcolonialism

Abstract

Postcolonialism is a cross-cultural critical theory that has emerged since the 1970s. It is a criticism with distinctive anti-colonial and anti-racist ideas, focusing on the search for decolonial paths while criticizing cultural hegemony. This paper attempts to analyze the novel The Joy Luck Club of the Chinese American female writer Amy Tan from the perspective of postcolonial criticism. As women from the third world country, Chinese American women are subjected to triple oppression in American society from the race, gender, and women of the first world countries, moreover, they become the Other marginalized by the American mainstream culture. As one of the Chinese American women, Amy Tan tries to break the silence of them and speaks for them by writing, in order to seek for a path of decolonization.