Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Grace Li’s novel Portrait of a Thief (2022) describes five Chinese-American col-lege students who embark on a mission to reclaim looted Chinese bronze zodiac heads from western museums. It resonates deeply with postcolonial discourses of cultural identity, historical injustice and power negotiation. This paper argues that Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theoretical framework, specifically his con-cepts of hybridity and the third space, offers a critical lens to reveal the novel’s resistance against colonial power and the dynamic reconstruction of cultural meaning. By analyzing the protagonists’ position as both insiders and outsiders within western society, this study demonstrates how Portrait of a Thief shows Bhabha’s vision of postcolonial resistance as a creative process. Through de-tailed textual analysis, this paper explores how Li’s narrative opposes essential-ist notions of eastern and western cultures, revealing the third space as a site of dialogue rather than domination.
Source: Social Sciences and Humanities
DOI: 10.63313/ssh.9054
Author: Rongrong Zhu
Institution: University of Shanghai for Science and Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7117243055