Imagine Otherwise by Kandice Chuh

Author:Kandice Chuh [Chuh, Kandice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2003-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

heterotopic visions

I have offered the foregoing analyses to show that though engaging significantly different historical conditions, both Clay Walls and A Gesture Life imply the need for a transnational approach to conceiving the processes of “Asian American” subject formation. These novels make visible the “simultaneity of geographies,” to borrow from Ketu Katrak (1996), the juxtapositionality of seemingly diachronically mappable historical frames. They thus register the inadequacy of U.S. nationalist accounts of immigration and settlement where arrival and achievement of identity with America stand as celebrated narrative closure. Neither common origin nor common destiny, the bookends that enclose such narratives of immigration and identity are to be found in these novels that leave us, finally, without resolution.

Moreover, that transnationalism not only describes cross-border flows but also much more radically, I think, prompts the deconstruction of common conceptions of space itself becomes evident through these novels. In other words, following through on these literary articulations of the convergence of seemingly spatially distinct historical fronts and narratives means disrupting the received conception of “Asia” as someplace and something that happens somewhere over there. If, as Alan Hyde has put it in the context of discussing treatments of “the body” in legal discourse, “seeing the world as socially constructed is a sort of academic fad” (1997, 6), it nonetheless takes a concerted effort to recognize the constructedness of what we may experience to be natural, real physical distances between places and peoples. Why do we experience physical location in terms of distance? And why and how does that experience of distance translate into difference?

As noted earlier, Asian American studies has employed such a spatial logic in its attempts to interrupt the racial essentialism of Asiatic racialization that homogenizes and offers “Asianness” as ahistorical and emanating from prediscursive bodies. In that way, the naturalized affiliation of territory with identity has been coopted and deployed to advance Asian Americanist efforts to contest anti-Asian racism in the U.S. frame. At the same time that Asian American studies continues its efforts to make visible the heterogeneity elided by Asiatic racialization, the insights of transnationalism and of postcolonial studies as articulated in the novels considered here compel a somewhat different response, one geared toward denaturalizing geography as the underwriting rationale for differences among “Asiannesses.” I do not mean to suggest that there are not real and distinguishable territories in the world and that there are not real people who live in them. Nor am I arguing that those people in those places do not live lives particular to those locations. What I am getting at is that there is no reason that that place should be perceived necessarily as any more foreign by virtue of location than, say, California or Texas or Alaska. The territories designated by these names are effectively no more distant in my experience of them, sitting here at this moment in the place called Washington, D.C., than that place called Korea. All of which is to recall that the unity of the United States is

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