DIASPORIC DRIFT: HYBRIDITY AND POSTCOLONIAL DISPLACEMENT IN LING MA’S SEVERANCE (2018)

Abstract

Ling Ma is a Chinese-American writer born in Fujian, and raised in China, Kansas and Utah. Her work is imbued with a sense of transnational mobility, cultural hybridity, and the lived experience of immigrant life. The theme of fragmented identity in the diaspora is captured in Severance, the latest published novel by Ma. This paper discusses how Ma uses the concept of hybridity as the main narrative processe that challenges the ambiguities of cultural belonging, displacement, and self-definition in a globalized world. Severance exposes the conflicts between assimilation and cultural preservation through the character of Candace Chen, a Chinese American woman who has to survive in the environment of the collapsing capitalist system and the haunting of the immigrant memory. Based on postcolonial theories of hybridity by Homi K. Bhabha, the analysis identifies the way the novel reimagines this zone as simultaneously a site of alienation and a locus of creative resistance. The narrative’s oscillation between monotonous routine and apocalyptic disruption mirrors the psychological dissonance of the diasporic subject, whose fractured identity parallels the broader dissolution of postmodern subjectivity under late capitalism. In the end, this paper claims that Severance changes the state of diasporic into an allegory of modern global precarity, and how hybrid identities can serve not only as symptoms of displacement but also as coping mechanisms in a more homogenized cultural environment.