Textual Expressions of the Search for Cultural Identity

Abstract

In the United States of America, the search for identity has been a recurrent literary theme, addressing the perceived plight of individuals, social groups and the nation as a whole. The revolution of the sixties both weakened the hegemony of the Euroamerican culture and strengthened the various 6subcultures. On the one hand, there was a tendency to question and even deny the traditional values, norms and beliefs which had laid the foundation of American identity; on the hand there was a powerful civil rights movement which drew attention to the situation of the other Americans whose life experiences and histories diverged from these norms. Such developments entailed a shift in the rhetoric from the assimilation metaphor of the melting pot to the multicultural metaphors of the cultural mosaic or salad bowl. In so-called marginal or ethnic groups, the quest for identity which followed often took the form of a rejection of the dominant culture, accompanied by the revival or (re)construction of their distinctive ethnic or marginal cultures, including a rewriting of the stories and of the communal history. The role played by the texts of writers of ethnic origin or who belong to these marginal groups has been central in this process of ethniclmarginal identity (trans)formation. A closer analysis of The Warrior Woman: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts1 by Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese-American), Be loved2 by Toni Morrison (African-American), and Ceremony-' by