Floating Currencies and "Colliding Worlds": Postcolonial Capitalism, Queer Diaspora, and Multicultural Recognition in Gold by the Inch

This article addresses queer subjectivities produced under postcolonial capitalism. In a context in which economic value is virtualized via currency floats, high-volume trading, and other financial practices, subjectivity is likewise virtualized such that sexual, racial, gender, and ethno-national differences come to be framed as interchangeable and persistently in motion. Putting theories of postcolonial capitalism in conversation with queer diasporic critique, I read Lawrence Chua's novel Gold by the Inch (1998) as an ambivalent engagement with the sexual and racial logics specific to Southeast Asian multiculturalism. Focusing on Chua's extensive use of second-person narration and the ethical ambiguity of the novel's unnamed protagonist, I argue that multicultural recognition—a process of mutual valorization of cultural differences amongst those seen as equals—in postcolonial Southeast Asia commensurates the increasingly proximate but not identical subjectivities of those working for capitalist accumulation and those who have been rendered part of a permanently surplus population. Such commensuration effaces the raced, gendered, and sexualized modes of domination required to sustain this surplus population in perpetuity. In contrast, my reading of Gold by the Inch emphasizes the non-identity of queer postcolonial subjectivities that mark ruptures in postcolonial capitalism's governance of heterogeneity.