Narrating Race

Narrating Race is a welcome collection of diverse essays from scholars of Asia-Pacific literature and culture, especially those working within a postcolonial, transnational, or diasporic perspective. Edited by Robbie B. H. Goh, the volume of fourteen essays originated from a 2006 conference at the National University of Singapore on “Narrating Race Between Nationalism and Globalization.” Topics range from the literature of the Eurasian community in Singapore, visual culture and modernity in India, and Australian refugee fiction, to Chinese–Filipino cinematic representations and poetry of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora. In terms of genre and discipline, the essays address narrative fiction, drama, poetry, film, and photography, and cover much history, sociology, and politics along the way.What holds the various essays together is the question of race in Asia's complicated, multiethnic, and multilingual nations. As Goh writes in his introductory essay, “Writing Race and Asia-Pacific Mobilities: Constructions and Contestations,” many nations in Asia “inherited racially-diverse societies at the time they gained independence ... and had to grapple with development problems that often played out along racial lines” (4). His introduction gives a lucid, if necessarily truncated, overview of some of these complexities, from Indian caste and tribal politics, to the tensions in Malaysia and Indonesia between “natives” and Indian and Chinese populations. Drawing on work by Aihwa Ong, he stresses the fluidity and “abjection” involved in racial constructions in a globalizing world, which perpetuate “racial boundaries in conditions of change occasioned by economic modernization and capitalist rationalization” (16). By stressing the “inter-Asian relations, rather than Asian and non-Asian ones” that produce “rapidly changing racial roles in Asian modernization” (22), Goh provides a salutary corrective to ideas of contemporary race relations primarily as a phenomenon arising from the migration of global south populations to the global north (North America or Europe). Rather, the unevenness of development within Asia draws on racializations of the colonial era and refigures them with newer dynamics conflating race with development hierarchies—the lower-income regions (Bangladesh, the Philippines, India) often providing labor migrants to the more prosperous (Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea).It is along these lines that the collection makes its major contribution. Narrating Race functions as a much-needed complement to the field of critical race studies, the established scholarly field in the U.S. academy that grew from the study of ethnic and minority literatures. While critical race studies has produced some of the most sophisticated understandings of the constitutive relationships between race, modernity, and nation-building, it is limited by its focus on the U.S. or transatlantic context; consequently, the configurations of Native dispossession, African American enslavement, and exclusionary U.S. immigration policy have often become the paradigm for understanding racial formations anywhere. Goh's collection, at its best, provides historical, social, and cultural accounts of other ways in which racial formations have been central to conceptions of nation and modernity, demonstrating how colonial policies, migration patterns, economic development, and nationalist struggles can take vastly different trajectories.For example, Lily Rose Tope's essay on Eurasians in Singapore provides a succinct historical account of the way this racialized group constituted a “managed ethnicity” from the early days of the colony, prefiguring the current Singaporean state's fine-tuned regulation of multiethnicity. Caroline Hau's excellent essay tracks changing representations of ethnic Chinese in Philippine cinema, beginning with an intriguing observation on the recent “Asianizing [of] Filipino moviegoers” (128), who have turned from the hegemony of Hollywood cinema to a more regional and “Asian” outlook. Hau traces Chineseness in the Philippines from its early signification as “Chinese mestizo,” to outsider from the national community, to the way current-day Chineseness is “no longer defined solely by its problematic place within the nation, but by its additional revaluing as a signifier of ... regionally specific capitalist development” (134). Essays like Hau's demonstrate how racial typologies in Asia, while they may share a common colonial origin with those seen in the United States, have had their own distinct historical determinants and afterlives.Wenche Ommundsen's essay on refugee literature in Australia provides a useful introduction to the specific history of race relations in that settler colony, giving the reader an account of how “whiteness is not a unified category, but subject to modification, and manipulation, within the contested space of the nation” (242). Despite Australia's self-conscious adoption of multiculturalism since the 1970s, race relations are remanaged and recomposed such that whiteness still operates as the invisible dominant. Ommundsen's brief but cogent readings of contemporary white authors writing about the refugee crisis in Australia is thus carefully informed by the larger social impetus toward assimilation and invisibility.The essays are more or less split between studies that attempt to present to the nonspecialist reader a wider picture of race relations as an effect of historical and social configurations (Aveling, Sankaran, Hau, Tope, Ommundsen) and ones that focus—more traditionally—on close readings of the texts (Roy, Tam, Yip, Mehta, Lam). The best, like Hau's and Aveling's, do both, convincingly relating cultural production to the larger determining forces without making them seem mere superstructural effects. These essays go beyond the simple—and by now rather tired—celebration of transnationalism and hybridity as transgressive and therefore automatically desirable. Several of the essays in the collection unfortunately are still wedded to the latter model of analysis, unproblematically reading a one-to-one relationship between a character's agency or identity and the larger political or transnational ideal he or she represents. Lacking is an examination of how and why notions of racial homogeneity versus mixedness are produced in the first place: how exactly do notions of “native” versus “outsider” intersect and morph with the changing demands of national development, immigration patterns, or global capitalism?For instance, Julie Mehta's essay on Pico Iyer's writings places undue value on anything hybridized (Iyer is described admiringly as “the most hybridized” among a field of exilic Asian writers). Yet her glowing account of hybridity relies on constructing Japan—Iyer's adopted home—as the most monolithic and homogenous of societies. A more nuanced account of how “Japan's obsession with purity” (200) was historically produced, its own relationship with the imported discourse of modern racial taxonomies, and more interrogation of Iyer's overt Orientalist fantasies about Japan and Japanese women would have been useful. Like Mehta, Kwok-Kan Tam, in an essay on English-language plays from Hong Kong, presents vague notions of “globalization” and its celebrated spin-offs, the “hybrid” and the “transcultural,” as first and foremost conditions of individual subjective identity, ignoring issues of class mobility, material life, and comparative racial privilege. It is as if the only goal of such texts is to “perform self-narrations” and produce “auto-ethnographic accounts of race and identity” (180)—a narrow critical function indeed.Despite the theoretical weakness of some of the essays in Narrating Race, the collection is valuable for the larger view it provides on the current state of studies of culture and race in the Asia-Pacific. In the more successful essays, we see the demanding level of interdisciplinary skills needed to undertake such work. Colonial and postcolonial histories, changing regional and economic relationships, shifts in racial significations in both law and representational practices, and textual readings with sufficient attention to local genres and languages—all are essential for the contemporary critic's toolkit. Despite the occasional overuse and confusion of such categories as hybridity, transnationalism, and globalization, and the omission of large areas of the Asia-Pacific (e.g., the small Pacific Islands and their exceedingly complex racial configurations), the collection contributes to more sophisticated understandings of racial formations in the region, especially where it productively builds on concepts such as Ong's flexible citizenship or Ien Ang's critique of multiculturalism. Best of all, it demonstrates the potential richness of cultural studies in an area too often only studied for its economic development

Cosmopolitanism · Diaspora · Drama · Globalization · Literature · Modernity · Modernization theory · Narrative · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subaltern · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · History · Philippine History and Culture · Socioeconomic Development in Asia