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  • Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms by Wen Jin
  • Belinda Kong
Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms. By Wen Jin. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. 2012.

The impulse to transnationalize the study of Asian American literature has grown apace in the past two decades, at the same time that a similar pattern evolved in China studies, under such rubrics as diasporic, Sinophone, and global Chinese literature and culture. Few, however, have brought to this project the comparative systematicness, dual geographical depth, and sustained thematic focus that characterizes Wen Jin’s Pluralist Universalism. Well researched and richly contextualized, Jin’s book examines the ethno-racial policies of the United States and the People’s Republic of China through the lens of their respective fictions on multiculturalism. Reading English alongside Chinese literary texts while working with cultural and scholarly sources across both languages, Jin adroitly mines for parallels between the two nations’ seemingly oppositional multicultural visions—American liberal multiculturalism on the one hand, China’s policy of ethnic autonomy on the other. In the process, Jin brings into rare critical dialogue the U.S.’s and the PRC’s divergent treatments of minority groups, persuasively arguing that their two multiculturalisms be understood as part of a “global movement,” “two different but not entirely incongruous forms of pluralism that have increasingly come to bear on each other” (1).

As Jin observes, comparisons of the two countries’ ethno-racial policies often descend into a “solipsistic, accusatory mode” (xii), so that targeting the other regime’s minority governance has become constitutive to nationalistic rhetoric on both sides, giving rise to a recurrent and ever more prominent geopolitical discourse in our time. Given this polarized situation, Jin sees contemporary fiction as a fertile site for drawing out connections between the two official multiculturalisms and hence opening up a framework for “double critique.” Chapter 1 provides an informative survey of the historical origins and political underpinnings of American versus Chinese multiculturalism, one developing in the wake of racial desegregation and the other from socialist revolution. Yet both states, Jin asserts, “practice a conciliatory form of multiculturalism” that has at its core the “imperative of national unity” (43). Chapter 2 then identifies two popular novels, Clive Cussler’s Treasure of Khan (2006) and Jiang Rong’s Lang Tuteng/Wolf Totem (2004), that symptomize their countries’ conciliatory multiculturalism, each “projecting an image of ethno-racial harmony” while failing to tackle structural inequalities (73).

From there, Jin turns to works by minority authors—with particular emphasis on Chinese American fiction—that explicitly challenge conciliatory multiculturalism and that propose more inclusive models of pluralism. Chapter 3 focuses on Alex Kuo’s Panda Diaries (2006) as exemplifying a double critique of the U.S.’s and the PRC’s internal colonization of indigenous groups. Chapter 4 further probes the failures of both states’ multicultural policies toward their Muslim communities from the perspectives of two Muslim writers, Zhang Chengzhi and Rabih Alameddine. Finally, Chapter 5 mediates between the Chinese original and English translation of Yan Geling’s Fusang/Lost Daughter of Happiness (2001) as well as its critical reception in both languages, rereading the novel as not just a narrative of historical [End Page 222] racial and gendered oppression but an utopian “queer” text that “helps imagine and broker a radical kind of pluralist universalism” (200).

Compelling in its claims for the need to think between national discourses, to read minority writings comparatively and thereby transform our existing frameworks, Pluralist Universalism charts a valuable course for future transnational studies of both Asian American and Chinese literature.

Belinda Kong
Bowdoin College
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