Narrating Race: Asia, (Trans)Nationalism, Social Change ed. by Robbie B. H. Goh (review)

Narrating Race is a welcome collection of diverse essays from scholars of Asia-Pacific literature and culture, especially those working within a post-colonial, 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...