Searching for Mr. Chin

by Lee-loy, Anne-marie

• ISBN13: 9781439901304
• ISBN10: 1439901309
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-28
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr

Summary

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

Author Biography

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Forgotten Remembrance: Literature and the Banal Performance of Nation	p. 25
"Just Another Chinaman": The Chinese as Outsiders to the Nation	p. 43
"A Real Creolise Chinee": Establishing Creole Inclusiveness	p. 73
From the Other Side of the Counter: Chinese West Indian Self-Representations	p. 101
Conclusion	p. 141
Notes	p. 147
Selected Bibliography	p. l63
Index	p. 177
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