As part of a larger project on freedom and belonging in the Chinese Atlantic, I elaborate the logic of “incorporating.” I focus on the oeuvre of Chinese Trinidadian artist, writer, and dramatist Willi Chen. Chen is perhaps the best known writer of Chinese descent in the Anglophone Caribbean, but he has received little critical attention. The few scholars of Chen’s work argue that he offers a unique perspective on Trinidad’s racial dynamics, often through the figure of the Chinese entrepreneur that occupies a privileged position in much of Chen’s creative work. Of course, trade — particularly the traffic in people and the establishment of the plantation system that provided materials for European and, later, U.S. metropoles — is precisely what shaped the Atlantic into the engine of modernity. Within this system, Asian migrant labor complicated, destabilized, and sometimes contradicted a black-white social structure. I hypothesize that Chen’s work demonstrates a logic of “incorporating.” While the flesh that lingers in the root of the word incorporating is often the site through which economic and social adaptation becomes manifest, the financial dimensions suggested by this term point towards particular relations between the state, places, and individuals that exceed the boundaries of singular bodies—be they nations or people. The complexities engendered in this negotiation of person and collective enable new forms of belonging that shift our understanding of the nation-state and the subject ostensibly appropriate to that formation.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.2979/globalsouth.6.1.98.pdf

Incorporating: Chineseness in Chen's Trinidad

Kerry Young's recent novel Pao dramatizes a Chinese Jamaican experience against the backdrop of 20th-century Jamaican history. My article considers the novel, and especially its protagonist, Yang Pao, alongside theories and critiques of creolization and creole nationalism in Jamaica. I argue that, while Pao's own political beliefs perpetuate the ideal of a creole Jamaica in which different cultural groups can peacefully coexist, Young complicates this point of view, relying on the novel's women characters to represent a darker side of the postcolonial experience that specifically touches the black Jamaican majority.

/pdf/and-that-is-not-how-jamaica-is-cultural-creolization-3pp61bi8xh.pdf

“And that is not how Jamaica is”: Cultural Creolization, Optimism, and National Identity in Kerry Young's Pao

whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed. &dquo;2 It is in language of the novel that Trinidad has been imagined, but it is in the language of identity that it has resisted imagination. Trinidad, of course, is not unique among new nations in its search for national identity, but its abundance of writers, and what Stuart Hall has called its &dquo;over-determined&dquo; social structure, make it a heavily imagined, and imaged, commmnity. And it is a country where the writers have willingly taken up the call to nationhood, and where those who have not have been vilified. The novelist Earl Lovelace has said

Steve Harney

Papers

Willi Chen and Carnival Nationalism in Trinidad