Inclusion, exclusion and 'being singular plural': the Chinatown as a space for gender and racial performativity in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Verde Shanghai (2011)

• In Event: Asia/Asians in Contemporary Latin American Culture

Abstract

This paper explores the role the barrio chino (Chinatown) plays in the novel Verde Shanghai (Mexico, 2011) by Cristina Rivera Garza. Building on Jean-Luc Nancy's ‘being singular plural,’ and Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘strange encounters,’ the Chinatown is offered as a space for exposing the performativity of gendered and racialised bodies, refusing boundaries, bearing ambiguity and operating in a pluralistic mode. By examining how the figure of the ‘stranger’ is produced through knowledge in the encounter, the novel sheds light on how we already recognize ‘a stranger’ as the one we do not know, where some more than others are recognisable as strangers, while simultaneously revealing existence as coexistence. In this sense, and navigating the heterogeneous and complex stylisations of ‘Chineseness’ the Chinatown seems to contain, the barrio chino in Verde Shanghai brings to mind contingency and challenges certainty. The unstable notion of identity available in the novel exposes gender and race as unfixed and ambiguous. By dismantling gender and race, and fixed notions of belonging, the novel rethinks the idea of community, inclusion and exclusion. The novel thus highlights the notions of existence and coexistence as constitutive of the subject, hence rejecting binaries of difference and disavowing the Chinatown as the place of the ‘exotic.’

Author

• Maria Montt Strabucchi, University of Manchester