earticle

영어

This article aims to examine how socio-econo-political values of homelands interrupt immigrants’ adjustment to American society by reading Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Jumph Lahiri’s The Namesake in the perspective of M. M. Bakhtin, emphasizing the importance of ideas or ideologies in a hero’s identity formation. In these novels, the authors commonly criticize that the ideologies of homelands make it impossible for immigrants to enjoy a free and independent life. Here, ideological criticisms are entirely done in the way that anachronic ideologies in mother cultures are meticulously projected into the images of ancestor characters, and the absurdities are candidly exposed by protagonists interacting with them. Why these ideological criticisms are persuasive is that the incompatibility between traditional values of homelands and American reality is revealed through the protagonists’ ideological becoming. As a result, it is found that Cuban androcentrism and Castro’s communism, Korean Confucian patriarchy and careerism, and Indian family centrism are inappropriate for the diasporic reality. With the world being globalized and expatriates increasing, understanding these ideological problems is important not only to immigrants, but also to immigration policy-developers.