If Martin Mordecai’s poem “Chinyman” seems familiar on first reading, it is hardly surprising. The poem is built, after all, around a sense of jarring dislocation concerning the presence of a Chinese man in the West Indies, and the Chinese are not often the first ethnic community that comes to mind when one thinks of West Indian spaces.¹ Indeed, the poem’s imagery suggests that the Chinese man is not only displaced but that his presence in the West Indies is extremely tenuous: he moves “haphazardly,” is deemed “port-less,” and is so rootless that he is likely to be blown away...

This book explores the unstable literary representations of Chinese West Indians in relation to imagining them as belonging within West Indian nations and seeks to account for their ambiguous belonging in terms of the articulation of national narratives. Such an investigation requires reconsideration of how the concepts of “nation,” “national narrative,” and “national identity” are enacted in this region. It also looks at how these ideas affect the relationship between nation and literature. To that end, I would like tolooselyemploy a metaphor of the theater to draw attention to the multiplicity of narratives involved in the performance and...

Edward Said opensOrientalismwith the claim that “Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient” as Europeans.¹ He does so partially in recognition of the very different contact history that the United States has had with “the Orient” in comparison with that of Britain or France. Said notes that even the definition of “the Orient” has different connotations for Americans than it has for Europeans. He suggests that for Americans “the Orient” tends to denote what Said describes as the “Far East,” namely China and Japan, rather than including areas commonly designated as the “Middle East” (what...

One of the paradoxes of imagining nationhood is that nations must be both similar and distinct from other nations.¹ In other words, to be recognized as a viable nation in the international arena, nations must somehow “look” like other nations and, at the same time, be recognizably distinct. Usually, this distinctiveness is claimed on the basis of a unique cultural identity—the national identity. Thus, it is not surprising that a recurring theme throughout West Indian literature is the validation and celebration of the region’s cultural features, such as language use, food, and music, which are deemed to be the...

The readiness with which images of the Chinese have been used as boundary markers in West Indian national narratives of oppression and creoleness can be partially attributed to the visibility of Chinese ethnicity in the West. In other words, it is not that “being Chinese” somehow makes this ethnic group particularly suited to define the boundaries of nation; rather, their visible difference from the more numerically dominant sectors of West Indian populations, combined with their minority status, makes it both easy and attractive to imagine them in this symbolic role. In “The Fact of Blackness,” Frantz Fanon noted a similar...

In my parents’ home there is a sepia-colored water-damaged photograph that was taken in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1936. It is a formal photograph. In the center sits a brown-skinned woman, her hands resting loosely on the armrests of the chair on which she is seated. To her left stands a three-year-old boy, lower lip starting to protrude as he looks uncertainly at the photographer. To her right, an older boy leans toward the woman over the chair’s armrest, staring boldly into the camera. The boys are dressed neatly in the colonial fashion of the day: short pants, long knee socks,...