of transnational geopolitics on New York City’s Chinatown after 9/11 and after the 2008 financial collapse, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen in a recent essay states, “Chinatown in the American imagination and lived reality has been a gilded, segregated ghetto” (“New York after Chinatown” 27). Even though “with the effective repeal of racial exclusionary immigration laws and the gradual desegregation of New York housing, Chinese immigrant communities spread into all five boroughs and the tristate suburbs,” Tchen notes, New York Chinatown continues to play “the recurring scapegoating role of ‘dirty’ Chinatown”—a “staged role in New York’s political culture” (27, 39). These insightful and provocative analyses of the images and functions of Chinatown, however, focus largely on the construction and refashioning of this ethnic neighborhood in the city by the state or the dominant media, ideologies, and discourses.
With attention to the interactive effects between an internally diverse Chinatown and the changing American metropolis shaped by both domestic and international socioeconomic forces, sociologist Peter Kwong offers a more complex, protean picture of New York City’s Chinatown. Countering the stereotypes of Chinatown as a self-isolated, static community of “docile, apolitical, and uncommunicative” cultural aliens, Kwong shows with abundant evidence that the Chinese “have tried repeatedly to break out” of the isolation of Chinatown, resulting from racial discrimination and exclusion.” In so doing they “have proved themselves active and militant opponents of racial and political oppressions” (Chinatown 148). During the 1960s, new political ideologies “penetrated deeply into Chinese communities,” as civil rights “activists’ activities, social-welfare agencies, unions, and political parties slowly eroded the power of the traditional order,” even though “they have not yet displaced the hegemony of the Chinatown business and political elite” (Kwong, New Chinatown 7). The impact of the civil rights era continues to transform Chinatown as shown by the demonstration of “20,000 residents of New York’s Chinatown” against police brutality” in 1978 (8).
While Kwong has called critical attention to the mutually transformative relation between Chinatown and the larger American urban environment, little attention in literary studies has been given to the impact of Chinatown and other ethnic communities, including those of postcolonial exiles and diasporans, on the cultural, economic, and political landscape of the American city, whose identity is subsequently thrown into crisis.
Bruce Harvey in his book American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–1865 points out that “[t]he nation as a whole . . . defined itself through hierarchical, racial taxonomies of foreign regions (the Orient, Latin America, Polynesia, and Africa)” (5). Such spatialized discursive construction of intertwined racial and national identities also characterizes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, popular newspapers, and anthropological writings that define the identity of the city by portraying Chinatown as a self-contained yet pollutant ethnic ghetto, an exotic foreign terrain that does not belong to the American city. Newspaper reports, travel writings, and short stories by European Americans construct a Chinatown whose abject foreignness threatens to contaminate the American city that embodies the nation-space. Posited this way, the American city, then, becomes a battleground where the boundaries of race and nation-state are drawn and policed, as well as transgressed and redefined. Asian American city literature produces an interventional American cityscape, one in which Chinatown and the city in the United States are mutually constitutive and transformative and immigrants, migrants, and diasporans from the global South are changing the cultural and political landscapes of cities in the United States
Cities of Others: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature is an in-depth study of eight Asian American writers’ representations of urban space in American metropolises, from the late nineteenth century to the present.6 One of the key discoveries of this study is that there is a wide range of distinctively spatial strategies in Asian American city literature since its emergence in the nineteenth century. These strategies not only reveal the impact of spatially reinforced social isolation, cultural marginalization, and political exclusion on Asian Americans’ identity formation and subject constitution, but they also demonstrate the possibilities of resistance and intervention through everyday practices that reinhabit ethnic enclaves and the American city otherwise. Rather than merely segregated spaces divided by differences of race, gender, culture, and class, and contained by national borders, Chinatowns and other urban spaces emerge as dynamic spaces by and through which collective, personal, and political identities are constituted.
Those strategies and their effects, however, are often overlooked by critics of Asian American literature, who tend to focus on space conceived in terms of national territories, or in association with the nation-state and transnational border crossings.7 Still less has been written about Asian Americans’ representations of the American city and its relation to segregated ghettos and the global South. Although critics such as David Palumbo-Liu and Lisa Lowe have adopted broader critical approaches to space as a manufactured environment, and particular places whose identities and meanings are constructed through discourses, representations, and social relations in their respective studies of Asian American literary texts, much remains unexplored with regard to the writers’ spatially enacted narrative strategies and their effects.8 So far, no comprehensive treatment of these strategies and effects in Asian American literature has been conducted in literary studies.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON (URBAN) SPACE
Building on existing scholarship in Asian American criticism, Cities of Others pursues an interdisciplinary line of inquiry by drawing on established and emergent concepts about space, particularly urban space, developed in both the humanities and the social sciences. While the term space in this study includes places, it has broader meanings beyond those bounded by specific locations. Sociologist Rob Shields’s explanation of the meanings and implications of space can help clarify the concepts of space and the spatial used in this study. Shields refers to space as “one of the ‘unsaid’ dimensions of epistemological and ontological structures’ (Sack 1980)”; hence “to question ‘space’ is to question one of the axes along which reality is conventionally defined.” He uses the term “social spatialisation to designate the ongoing social construction of the spatial at the level of the social imaginary (collective mythologies, presuppositions) as well as interventions in the landscape (for example, the built environment).” This term “allows us to name an object of study which encompasses both the cultural logic of the spatial and its expression and elaboration in language and more concrete actions, constructions and institutional arrangements” (Places 31). Other theoretical perspectives on space, especially urban space, have further broadened the conceptual and critical framework of my inquiry.
Rather than treat space as a stable, passive container, a background, or a stage, Cities of Others highlights the fact that space is an “actor” in shaping the formation and transformation of the social, cultural, and political, even as it is produced and redefined in this process of mutually constitutive and transformative becoming. Scholars on space such as geographer Doreen Massey, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and philosopher Elizabeth Grosz have convincingly argued that space is not simply a product of social relations; it in fact plays an active role in constructing the social. Rather than merely an outcome of social relations, space makes possible different kinds of social relations and interactions. “And precisely because it is the product of relations,” Massey explains, “relations which are active practices, material and embedded, practices which have to be carried out, space is always in a process of becoming” (“Spaces of Politics” 283). Understood as “the very product of multiplicity and thus a source of dislocation, of radical openness,” space, then, has a dynamic relationship with “politics as a genuinely open process” (287). A rethinking of the relation between space and politics, Massey adds, will lead to “a greater concern not just with ‘difference,’ but the nature of the constitution of difference, and the constitution of identity” (288). A similar notion of space underlies Sassen’s analyses of global cities in which “a new geography of centrality and marginality” emerges as a result of economic globalization (“Whose City Is It?” 71). Moreover, Sassen argues, “[t]he