Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds

4. Comparative Colonial Narration: Conquest and Consumption in Sabina Murray’s Fictions

4 / Comparative Colonial Narration: Conquest and Consumption in Sabina Murray’s Fictions Racial Asymmetries pushes critics to reconsider the relationships among the Asian American writer, the narrator and narrative perspective , and the fictional world. On the one hand, each chapter explores a different facet of narrational refraction that troubles the link between the storytelling perspective and the Asian American writer. Unraveling the bind between narration and authorial background is of paramount concern in an era in which writerly authenticity can be commodified and certain narrative forms run the risk of being elevated over others. On the other hand, these Asian American fictions cannot be said to deploy a postracial aesthetic in which the writer’s creative output can be read as an expression of his or her unbridled freedom to imagine a narrative apolitical in its investments. The preceding chapter , for instance, calls attention to mixed-race Asian American writers, specifically Sigrid Nunez, whose background is not always mirrored in the ancestries of her novels’ main characters or protagonists. Nunez’s biographically inflected fictions speak to some of the chief social justice issues of the post–civil rights period, including the failures of the Vietnam War and the deterioration of the prison system. The sociohistorical contexts invoked by her narratives matter as much to our readings of Asian American literature as do the ancestries of narrators, protagonists, and minor characters. The fictional worlds conceived by Asian American writers such as Nunez possess a dynamic heterogeneity , which can be unpacked by directing our attention to the storytelling perspective. These works encourage scholars to make their comparative colonial narration / 137 interpretive methodologies more interdisciplinary and to expand the bounds of their social context critiques. This chapter, though also focusing on a mixed-race writer, shifts in order to more fully engage the transnational features of Asian American literature. Earlier chapters, of course, do gesture to transnationalism, especially with respect to the immigrant figure and American acculturation . Indeed, these four chapters remind us that the fictions produced within the past two decades have emerged under the aegis of increased attention to the interconnectedness the United States shares with all areas of the globe. Rather than engage in some sort of superficial recognition of American multiculturalism, these chapters reveal the rather insidious forms of systemic social inequalities and thus the myths underlying postracial discourses. Yet this chapter clarifies how Asian American writers can produce fictions set in different countries and historical eras that address and explore pressing social issues specifically interrelated by colonial and postcolonial contexts. Such works, while not always directly linked to racial oppression occurring in the United States, remind us that the Asian American fictional world extends far and wide. This chapter focuses on Sabina Murray’s fictional publications and logically progresses my larger argument in its exploration of Asian American writers who employ narrators of ancestral backgrounds different from their own. Murray’s larger fictional enterprise engages the racial asymmetries of fictional worlds, as many of her publications spotlight the complex dynamics of the colonial process from the vantage points of European, American, and Japanese empire building. These fictional works address structural inequalities wrought by aggressive international ventures based on dominion. I argue that it is instructive to consider Murray’s work through the lens of comparative colonialisms, as the scope of her fictions continually widens to include varied geographical terrains and temporal periods. I use the term “comparative colonialism ” in concert with Augusto Espiritu’s observations on developments in Filipino historiography. Drawing on the multiple colonial histories connected to the Philippines, Espiritu asserts the necessity of a “bi-national (if not multi-national) methodology” in any study of the country (181).1 Though Espiritu reviews a subset of historical studies, the label of “comparative colonialism” applies to Murray’s larger fictional project. Looking at Murray’s five fictional publications together reveals a strikingly diverse set of narrators and narrative perspectives that cannot be unified under one ethnoracial lens or colonial process. Though exploring representations and residues of American colonialism is itself a challenging 138 / comparative colonial narration endeavor, Murray’s aesthetic choices require a multilateral critical model that takes into account a plurality of national histories and geographical settings. Murray says, “Growing up in a place [the Philippines] that has been so powerfully colonized is what affects me. Because of that, for example, Mexico feels incredibly familiar to me even though I don’t speak Spanish. These...