Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature

ISBN-13: 9781439901304 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 198 str.

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy

Opis

What do twentieth-century fictional images of the Chinese reveal about the construction of nationhood in the former West Indian colonies? In her groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, "Searching for Mr. Chin, "Anne-Marie Lee-Loy seeks to map and understand a cultural process of identity formation: OC ChinesenessOCO in the West Indies.

Reading behind the stereotypical image of the Chinese in the West Indies, she compares fictional representations of Chinese characters in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana to reveal the social and racial hierarchies present in literature by popular authors such as V.S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, as well as lesser known writers and hard to access literary texts.

a

Using historical, discursive, and theoretical frameworks for her literary analysis, Lee-Loy shows how the unstable and ambiguous OC belongingOCO afforded to this OC middleman minorityOCO speaks to the ways in which narrative boundaries of the nation are established. In addition to looking at how Chinese have been viewed as OC others, OCO Lee-Loy examines self-representations of OC ChinesenessOCO and how they complicate national narratives of belonging.