Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011. viii, 283 pp. (Figures.) US$87.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-420-3424-4.
As a topic of critical inquiry, race remains an enigma despite the existence of a substantial and constantly growing literature on the topic. The problem, as scholars have repeatedly noted, is that while ideologies of race frequently posit their categories as timeless and unchanging, the actual contents of those categories vary greatly across different times and places. Race, in other words, is highly context-dependent, yet its logic also possesses a degree of continuity. The contributors to this volume grapple with this predicament by showing how the ever-shifting meanings of race are implicated in other axes of social formation including class, gender, nationality, sexuality, religion, caste, ethnicity, and language. Together, they demonstrate why critical race studies must constantly attend to multiple intersections while tracking the role of the body and its related discourses. The essays in the volume take up these questions by examining literary and cinematic texts from the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and various diasporic Asian sites.
In his introduction, Robbie B.H. Goh sketches out this complex theoretical and political terrain. He begins by noting that racial thinking permeates modern societies even though overt racism has been declining worldwide during the postwar period (although not without significant exceptions). In East, Southeast and South Asia, race is inextricably connected with colonialism and its postcolonial nation-state inheritors: “in the poly-ethnic make-up of Asia, continually stirred by colonial policy, nationalist agendas and the movements of people, race in many cases persists as a primal basis of a difference that is of sufficient force to lead to discrimination, factionalism, violence and even separatist struggles” (10-11). At the same time, race in Asia has become intertwined with other forms of social difference including class, gender, religion, language and ethnicity. Goh suggests that like global capital, contemporary manifestations of race are marked by “flexibility” (a term he borrows from the ground-breaking work of Aihwa Ong). He goes further by arguing that shifts in racial meaning take place through the ongoing discarding of certain characteristics, a fraught process he terms (after Kristeva) abjection. In the process, “a racial essence is retained and insisted upon, even as transnational capital and the movement of peoples necessitate creative re-constructions of that racial identity” (17). By rendering these processes immediate and apprehensible, literary and cultural production offer invaluable insights into the ongoing (re)formations of race.
While the range of locations, genres, and languages covered by Narrating Race give it a richly comparative dimension, it needs to be said that the individual chapters are somewhat uneven in addressing the issues laid out in Goh’s introduction. Some of the essays focus almost singularly on their texts of interest without drawing out the theoretical implications of their analyses in a sustained manner, resulting in a somewhat cursory engagement with larger questions of race and modernity. Such unevenness is perhaps unavoidable in this kind of collection, but at their best, the critical interventions collected here track the flexibility of racialization with remarkable erudition, nuance and insight.
To take just one example, Caroline S. Hau offers a fascinating discussion of recent mainstream Filipino films that feature ethnic Chinese characters. Rooted in the specific history of race relations in the Philippines, these films endeavour to make sense of the rise of China as a regional power as well as the global success of Asian popular culture industries. Hau notes that during the Marcos era, the government sought to integrate the Chinese population into Filipino society as part of an overall strategy of expanding trade relations with other Asian countries including China. These impulses have continued into the present and prompt the resignification of racial codes stemming from the Philippines’ long colonial history. In Mano Po (dir. Joel Lamangan, 2002), for instance, Chinese Filipinos are integrated into the category of the mestizo, a move that marks a departure from the conventional association of the term with whiteness. By doing so, the film offers “a Chineseness that … enables the Chinese Filipino to be safely Filipinized without curtailing its ability to mediate the external sources of social power created by the expanding Chinese regional and global economy” (136). Mano Po reflects the relatively peripheral position of the Philippines within the global capitalist order. Within this context, its portrayal of mestizo hybridity effectively reinforces ethnic categories such as Chinese even while reconfiguring the racial matrixes in which Chineseness becomes legible in Filipino culture.
Analyses such as this indicate the tremendous potential of the critical approach taken by Narrating Race. Read together, the essays make a convincing case for critical race studies as a powerful lens through which to comprehend postcolonial legacies in contemporary Asian cultural production while demonstrating how culture in turn reconfigures the very grounds in which race is rendered meaningful.
Christopher Lee
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
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