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  • Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms by Wen Jin
  • Christopher Lee (bio)
Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms, by Wen Jin. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. 241 pp. $52.95 cloth. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1187-8.

Liberal multiculturalism in the United States, Wen Jin argues, is a lot like multiculturalism in China, by which she means the policies employed by the socialist state to manage relations among its ethnic groups. Exactly how to think about this comparison—how to understand the meaning of “like” in other words—is the subject of Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms, an ambitious and timely study that draws together Asian American and Chinese literature in original and provocative ways. Sino–U.S. relations have always involved multiple forms of comparison as both sides contend with their similarities and differences in the quest for strategic advantage. Nowhere is this seemingly intractable process more evident than in the realm of ethnic relations. While the treatment of minority groups (i.e., groups other than the dominant Han ethnicity) in China, especially in places such as Tibet and Xinjiang, is routinely condemned in U.S. media and politics, the criticism of American racism has been a staple in China at least since the Mao period. Against this background, Jin offers a sustained critique of “solipsistic,” “accusatory mode[s] of comparison” in which “the other country is used as a foil for one’s own” (x).

Jin argues that multiculturalism arises out of the contradiction between the normative homogeneity that underscores nationalism and the existence of actual diversity within the nation-state. The title of her book, Pluralist Universalism, encapsulates the tension between demands for national unity on the one hand and the political claims of ethnic, cultural, and racial difference on the other. Although a global phenomenon, multiculturalism has multiple local forms. The comparison of these forms demands what Jin (who borrows the term from Walter Mignolo) calls “double critique,” which entails comparative thinking in the conventional sense—the study of similarities and differences—while steadfastly refusing to ground comparisons in normative political or philosophical criteria.

Scholars based in the West, including those trained in Asian American studies, thus need to bracket liberal concepts such as rights and recognition in order [End Page 338] to understand how the version of multiculturalism adopted in China after the 1949 revolution represents a different form of governmentality, one that draws on aspects of imperial governance but is explicitly modeled on policies that were formed in the Soviet Union. For readers unfamiliar with this background, Jin provides a useful introduction in the first chapter, which also surveys key themes in post-1960s U.S. multiculturalism, a topic likely to be more familiar to readers in Asian American studies. The remaining four chapters of Pluralist Universalism demonstrate the efficacy of double critique by offering materialist and formalist readings of selected fiction from China and the United States. Together, the chapters elaborate the methodological problematic of “different but similar,” the recognition that parallels need not, and indeed must not, be reduced into neat fits.

The second chapter takes up Jiang Rong’s international bestseller Wolf Totem (2004, translated into English in 2008) and Clive Cussler’s genre novel Treasure of Khan (2006). Jin demonstrates how both texts deploy Mongolian characters to signify ethnic difference but do so from explicitly Chinese and American perspectives. While both novels use these encounters to reflect critically on ethno-chauvinism and imperialism—often by referencing ethnic relations in their Chinese or American counterparts—they ultimately reaffirm their own national imaginaries by embracing what Jin calls “conciliatory multiculturalism,” an ambiguous and problematic logic that proclaims the possibility of integrating difference into the unified nation.

The following chapters explore alternatives to this conciliatory logic. Chapter 3 focuses on Chinese American writer Alex Kuo, an accomplished experimental writer who has been largely neglected in Asian American literary studies despite being active since the mid-1970s. Jin shows how Kuo employs metaphor in his fiction in order to draw unlikely parallels—between Native Americans and the indigenous Oroqen people of northeastern...

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