An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture (review)

Crystal Parikh's An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture is a welcome addition to the field of comparative studies on race and ethnicity in North America and especially to the critical body of scholarship that examines post-1965 configurations of race and ethnicity. Parikh reads an interesting array of Asian American and Latino literary texts and cultural phenomena while focusing on how both minority groups have been rendered "alien" in the U.S. social and cultural imaginary. The "alien," or the perpetual foreigner, has become a critical term in comparative studies for examining Asian Americans and Latinos without losing sight of the long history of the black-white racial binary and without lapsing into the celebratory rhetoric of multiculturalism. Notable examples of this include Claire Jean Kim's work and the recent collection of critical essays, Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States. With her thesis of "racial triangulation," Kim shows how the racial hierarchy of the white top versus the black bottom operates in tandem with the "civic ostracism" of Asian Americans that alienates them from the state and civil society.¹ Likewise, Nicholas De Genova emphasizes in the introduction to Racial Transformation that Asian Americans and Latinos have long been "a constitutive outside against which the white supremacy of the U.S. nation-state could imagine its own coherence and wholeness."² Parikh participates in this important critical conversation by illustrating not just how the status of the alien informs the minority subject but also how this can become the basis of what she calls an "ethico-political project" (6).

At the same time it is indebted to existing scholarship on comparative racialization, Parikh's approach to the trope of betrayal in Asian American and Latino literature is guided by the post-Enlightenment philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida on ethics. Instead of being a set of normative rules that regulate the subject's actions, post-Enlightenment ethics predicate the subject's existence and constitution on its openness toward the category of the Other. An ethics of betrayal as such, then, is not so much about outlining the moral boundaries of subjects and communities as about how minority subjects are located at the interstices of the self and the Other, marked by sacrificial and constitutive acts of betrayal. The ethico-political project Parikh sees at the heart of an ethics of betrayal views the potential of democracy, or the "democracy to come," à la Derrida, in the realm of the unknowable and the uncertain that enters the horizon of perception through ethical encounters between the self and the Other. Parikh reads what she terms a "parable" of betrayal in each chapter while attending to the concrete expressions of ethical encounters.

In chapter 2, where Parikh reads Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman and Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, the ethical encounter between the self and the Other is examined in the critical context of the turn to transnationalism in ethnic studies and American studies. Parikh asks if this critical turn is a betrayal of the initial cause of ethnic studies, galvanized by minority movements, to claim the nation. By tracing the role of the "feminine diasporic other"—the Hong Kong dream girl in Chin's play and the mother, Helen, in Jen's novel—in the making and unmaking of Asian American selves, Parikh shows that transnationalism is not "a 'new' theoretical development but a belated arrival of the diasporic other that has been foreclosed in the discourse of claiming the nation" (37, 33). If chapter 2 features the diasporic other as feminine, in chapter 3 the father becomes the Other to the assimilatory aspirations of the minority subject in Parikh's reading of Richard Rodriguez and Erik Liu. She situates them in the New...