Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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lost in the margins of society, forever longing for a home far away, is a central theme explored in chapter 6, “The City as a ‘Contact Zone’: Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music.” For Alexander, the “radical migrancy” that marks the experience of “creatures of postcoloniality” who border nation-states and linguistic boundaries can compel “an exhilarating art, an art that takes as its birthright both dislocation and the radical challenge of reconceiving American space” (Shock of Arrival 161, 158). I borrow the concept of “contact zone” from Mary Louise Pratt as employed in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, which calls critical attention to the “interactive dimensions” of those encounters and “how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other” within “radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). In Manhattan Music the city is a protean “contact zone” constituted by people from around the world and by the diasporic communities and their connections to other parts of the world. Alexander re-represents the city as “American space” by allowing her female Asian Indian characters to inhabit the city through border crossings, transformative encounters, subversive memories, and artistic as well as social activism. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theories, I highlight the relationship between the raced, gendered body and the metropolitan space in the subject formation of South Asian women immigrants and diasporans, whose actual and symbolic crossings of streets in New York City mobilize a transformative process of both the postcolonial female subject and the American city.
Chapter 7, “‘The Living Voice of the City’: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” further explores Asian Americans’ struggles to claim belonging in the city and to inhabit the city with their irreducible difference as equal citizens. Unlike the earlier writings about the spatialized racial position of Asian immigrants, migrants, and Asian Americans in the American city discussed so far, Lee’s Native Speaker seeks to claim a rightful place in the city not just for one ethnic or racial group but for all immigrants and minority Americans, particularly the “countless unheard nobodies” (83). Moreover, its claim of belonging goes beyond the mobility and freedom of those considered racial and cultural “Others” to live where they wish to; it demands their equal participation in the political system of the city. Native Speaker raises questions about apparently conflicting claims of national and transnational belongings among Asian Americans and calls for new ways of inhabiting the city, which insist on equal participation politically and otherwise of “these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians,” who are changing the landscape of the American city and nation-space (83). I examine the ways in which the Korean American narrator’s flânerie and his observations of the political dramas and everyday scenes in the streets of the metropolis play a crucial role in articulating the novel’s thematic concerns.
Further pursuing Asian American writers’ enactment of the politics of space in the era of economic restructuring and globalization, chapter 8, “Mapping the Global City and ‘the Other Scene’ of Globalization: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,” examines the effects of Yamashita’s magical realist strategies for mapping the cityscape of Los Angeles on a global scale, especially the city’s relationship to the global South. Maps and mapping, the late geographer J. B. Harley convincingly argued, are not simply scientific depictions of geography. They are epistemological, political, and pedagogical tools for claiming territories and for legitimizing plunder, conquest, and divisions between peoples and nations (281).The major characters in Tropic of Orange offer alternative interpretations of the official map and insist on inscribing power relations along with layers of histories of the city, the Americas, and other parts of the world, as well as the everyday experience of the displaced, the marginalized, and the homeless in Los Angeles as a global city intricately bound up with the global South. By mapping the global South—the “other scene” of globalization (Spivak’s phrase in “Globalicities” 74)—in the global city, Yamashita registers not only large-scale social injustice but also powerful resistance uncontainable by spatial segregation or border control. The cityscape of L.A., then, manifests not just the “spatialization of global power projects”; it is a “new frontier zone” for a new politics of resistance (Sassen, “Reading the City” 15, 16). Employing magical realism to disrupt linearity of time and to dislodge space from bounded territories, Tropic of Orange marks a new departure in Asian American literature in both thematic concerns and narrative strategies, compelling a new mode of interdisciplinary approach, which my study seeks to advance by engaging with discourses and debates on globalization, as well as Asian American criticism.
In “Conclusion: The I-Hotel and Other Places,” I seek to further extend the conceptual and critical framework for reading Asian American city literature and for “thinking radical democracy spatially” (Massey’s phrase in “Thinking” 283). Given the diverse, heterogeneous histories, experience, and narrative strategies of Asian American writers, it is especially necessary to keep “our critical geographical imagination” open to “redefinition and expansion in new directions,” to borrow the phrases of Patricia Yaeger (15). I contend that to renew “our intellectual apparatus” in order to expand “our ethical and imaginative engagements,” as Yaeger urges in her introduction to the special topic on cities for a 2007 issue of PMLA (15), more critical attention must be given to city literature by minority American writers. Asian American writings about urban space offer incisive theorizing perspectives on metropolises, global cities, transnational ethnic enclaves, and inner-city ghettos. As a way of overcoming the thematic and methodological limitations in my reading of Asian American city literature, I include Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010) and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2004). My brief discussion of these two novels is also intended to call critical attention to the politics and poetics of space embedded in their respective narrative strategies in order to further open up the conceptual and historical frameworks for studying urban literature. If Yamashita’s novel shows how the I-Hotel became a catalytic site of grassroots community activism for human rights and housing rights, for racial and spatial justice, and thus demonstrates the transformative agency of the marginalized Others in shaping the history and geography of the city, thúy’s novel testifies to the legacy of U.S. imperialism and the social, cultural marginalization of Vietnam War refugees in American society. By depicting the trauma of the refugees, who bear witness to the destruction visited by the U.S. military on Viet Nam and in whose memories its disappeared forests, landscapes, and way of life exist, thúy, like Yamashita, embeds in the urban geography of the United States the “visions and voices” of those who are transforming the cultural and political geography of the American city and nation-space.
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“THE WOMAN ABOUT TOWN”
Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings
Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.
For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics.
—MICHEL DE CERTEAU
[B]oth the external and internal design and layout of the City symbolize male power and authority and men’s legitimate occupation of these spaces.
—LINDA MCDOWELL
IN DECEMBER 1896, AFTER SPENDING SIX MONTHS IN THE THUNDER Bay District by Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada, as a correspondent for the Montreal Daily Star, Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton replaced her sister Winnifred Eaton as a full-time reporter in Kingston, Jamaica, for Gall’s Daily News Letter. She stayed there for half a year as a socially and culturally engaged journalist, covering an electoral campaign, legislative council proceedings, and other social events, discussing issues such as womanhood and women’s rights, and writing reports on the prison, orphanages, charity schools, the market scenes, and department stores, as well as short stories, reviews, and a children’s column. The wide range of topics in her writings for the Jamaican paper reflects the freedom of spatial mobility Eaton enjoyed in Jamaica, where