Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (review)

Since the 1970s, Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have largely been studied in individual national contexts, as racial minorities within Canada or the United States. Over the past decade, however, scholars have increasingly viewed such populations as diasporas, linked by ancestral, cultural, and economic ties that cross national boundaries. This volume itself is evidence of the advantages of such transnational thinking: edited by two Australian academics, it contains essays by Canadian, American, and Australian critics, surveying authors of Chinese descent in all three countries.

Such juxtapositions can create greatly expanded intellectual contexts. The poetry of Chinese-Canadian poet Fred Wah is read in the light of Harvard professor Tu Wei-ming's theory of 'cultural China' and of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's film In the Mood for Love. Chinese-Australian novelists Brian Castro and Simone Lazaroo are compared to American counterparts such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. From essay to essay, readers are encouraged to think beyond national borders, encountering new work by new writers that may provide a fresh perspective on their own research.

Based on this collection, it would seem that Canadian scholars are in the forefront of diasporic thinking. Essays by Lily Cho, Guy Beauregard, and Donald C. Goellnicht – all well-known scholars of Asian-Canadian literature – offer sophisticated accounts of what a concept of 'diasporic Chinese literature' can offer interpreters of Canadian writing. Cho links the poetry of Fred Wah to a broader trend in the diaspora towards 'deconstructing Chineseness,' while also finding in Wah a struggle towards diasporic connection, a 'longing for something that defies the binds of historicism.' Beauregard assesses the current 'problem of diaspora' and its confrontation with ethnic studies, while arguing that Wah and video artist Richard Fung develop a 'poetics of diaspora' that emphasizes practical agency. And Goellnicht describes a shift in Asian-Canadian writing from 'immigrant' to 'disaporic' narratives, a shift that has also opened up Asian-Canadian literature to explorations of queer sexuality.

Elsewhere in the book, however, the concept of diaspora is theorized only tentatively. Few of the authors explain how the diasporic paradigm differs from the older mode of ethnic studies, or account for what is distinctively diasporic in their analyses. The majority of the essays focus only on one national literature, and many do not provide enough context to allow, say, a Canadian reader to understand the situation of a Chinese-Australian writer.

Perhaps this volume's greatest service to North American readers is its introduction of the work of Ouyang Yu, a provocative Chinese-Australian poet who is the subject of one essay by Wenche Ommundsen and is mentioned in at least two others. Ouyang, a relatively recent immigrant whose work includes fiction, criticism, and translation in both Chinese and English, has earned the label 'the angry Chinese poet' for his scathing critiques of Australian racism; but his rhetoric is also tinged with a moving, melancholy lyricism. If Ouyang Yu is the face of the new diasporic Chinese literature in English, the field has an exciting future indeed.