Introduction Reading Globality

Globality and the Domestic: A Personal Anecdote

At about the time of the big mergers that Yergin wrote about (around 2000), I was raising two young children: one was almost three and the other almost one then. Playing with them at the park near my home in suburban Mississauga2 one morning, I met a young Filipina with a little blond boy. Immediately I knew that she was a nanny in Canada’s live-in caregiver program.3 My children were on the swings nearby; both had brown hair and their father’s Scottish-Canadian coloring. After a friendly visual acknowledgment and the recognition that we were “kababayan” (folks from the same town/country), we exchanged the usual hellos and introductions. Daisy, who had just turned 20, told me that she was working in her first domestic position. She had been in Canada for only about eight months. “Oh,” I told her, with a smile, “I’ve been here for over twenty years now.” She gave me a look of disbelief, mixed with scorn, and said, “What? You’ve been here over twenty years, and you are still a nanny?” I had to explain somewhat embarrassingly that the two children I was watching were my own and that I was not a nanny but a “teacher” at a university. We were both diasporic Asians, but our situations then were not similar.

I’ve told this story to a few friends, and we have laughed at Daisy’s mistaking me for a nanny and especially at her assumption that I was so lazy or hopeless that I was stuck in that position for such a long time. Yet the encounter is revealing of how aspects of globalization have now permeated our domestic sphere and even our psyches. It is no longer unusual to find strangers in our familial space mothering our children or taking care of our geriatric parents. An estimated five million women from the Philippines work in domestic service in more than 130 countries of the world. They provide elder care, child care, and/or house-cleaning and cooking in private homes in countries such as the United States, Canada, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Hong Kong, England, Saudi Arabia, and other countries around the world.4 Feminist scholars have called them “servants of globalization” (Parreñas, Servants of Globalization), and their work is viewed as an example of the “flexibilization of labour” that “has cheapened women’s work . . . and has created a slavelike situation as they are forced to work for measly wages under poor working conditions” (Citizenshift, “Feminization of Migration”). Globality has resulted in our association today of certain racialized bodies as those suited to particular kinds of migrant labor: Filipina nannies, Indonesian housekeepers, Sri Lankan cooks, and so on.5 In the instance I have mentioned, the association was why Daisy did not recognize me as the natural mother of the children I was watching.

At the same time, this scene illustrates the incredible opportunities afforded by the movement of people across the globe. Within a single generation, immigrants to North America have established themselves as professionals in corporations, in institutions of higher learning, in law, in health and medicine, and even in sports. This mobility can be seen as an example of the triumph of our systems of immigration and multiculturalism, but it has also created many disjunctions and tensions within the group.6 Daisy’s comments indicated that she believed she would work herself out of her position as a domestic. In her mind, this job was a way to achieve permanent resident status in Canada. She saw herself not as a permanent “servant of globalization” but as someone with agency. I have juxtaposed these two accounts—one a very public story of big mergers and the other an inconsequential, perhaps humorous one of misidentification at the private level—because they illustrate the importance of everyday stories. The condition of what we call globality cannot be understood by simply looking at statistics, corporate mergers, and business practices. We need the narratives of those who are profoundly affected by displacements to see how they are dealing with the changes brought about by the increase in mobility and the unfastening of identities from their national affiliations. These everyday narratives illustrate the ways people negotiate, cope with, and surmount the complexities brought about by the breaking down of boundaries and barriers, be they regional, national, or sectarian, relating to gender, class, or religious affiliation.

Globalization, Globality, and Mobility

Although some critics argue that globalization had already begun by the end of the nineteenth century, the term has only recently been used widely to refer to the accelerated pace of marketization, use of technology, and transnational movement of people and things seen in the last decade. I use the term globalization, as a number of scholars do, to refer to “new corporate strategies” (Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 4), to the “new international division of labor,” and to “challenges to the nation-state as the basic organizational unit of society” (Dirlik, Global Modernity, 163). In the late nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, worldwide transcontinental connections were already present, but these links were relatively weak. Martin Shaw defines today’s globality as “the breaking down of spatial limits. It is defined, in some accounts, as the tendency of social relations to achieve global reach or scope, together with the intensification of such global interconnections due to the compression of relations of time and space [ . . . ]. These tendencies are also connected to the increased understanding of the world as a common human environment. Ecological globalists represent human life as part of the planetary system of our globular Earth (“War and Globality”). For Shaw, globalization and the global order fully came into being only in the early 1990s after the end of the cold war, which opened the former communist world to world markets and communications.7 Before the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when there was a perceived threat from communist Russia, “American public opinion toward China was on a virtually war-level footing” (Teles, “Public Opinion and Interest Groups,” 44). While Pakistan allied itself with the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the Central Treaty Organization, and the United States, India “was the Soviet Union’s most valued Third World ally” (Bhutto, “Pakistan’s Foreign Policy,” 148). Today, however, in the new post–cold war world order, the three countries to which the United States and Canada have outsourced the most jobs are China, India, and Mexico (Myers, “US Underestimates Jobs Lost to Outsourcing”).

I use the term globality rather than globalization because it is less charged with economic and corporate connotations. Issues of globality include concern for the earth and our environment, heath and the spread of disease across national borders, the globalization of markets, and the production of goods. Manfred Steger distinguishes between globalization and globality by defining globality as a “social condition characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural, and environmental interconnections and flows that make many of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrelevant” (Globalization, 7), globalization as “a set of social processes that are thought to transform our present social condition into one of globality” (8).

My book deals with the way recent novels, plays, and films by Asian North Americans engage critically with globalization and what Shaw calls “globality.” In particular, many Asian North American authors manifest an attitude of “critical globality,” a term Alys Weinbaum and Brent Edwards define as “thinking about structures of domination as confluent across national borders, and at the same time unevenly felt within them, [. . .] paying attention to the relationship of historical reciprocity between class and race in the context of western imperialism and over-development, again, both within nations and among them, [ . . . ] being suspicious and questioning of the term ‘globality’ itself” (“On Critical Globality,” 270). These authors use their novels, plays, and/or films to interrogate, critique, and sometimes even playfully engage with the effects of globalized conditions. Their works reveal their acute awareness of the inequalities that have resulted from the globalization of markets, the overuse and misuse of the environment and natural resources, and the consequences of the breakdown of national geographical or spatial limits.

As a number of scholars have noted, globalization has not brought about the kind of freedom and amelioration of the standard of living of people in all parts of the world that some once thought it would. Masao Miyoshi has noted that in postcolonial countries many once-colonized nations in the Third World are still struggling with the management of an independent state and also with the effects of globalization: “Once absorbed into the ‘chronopolitics’ of the secular West, colonized space cannot reclaim autonomy and seclusion; once dragged out of their pre-colonial state, the indigenes of the peripheries have to deal with the knowledge of the outside world, irrespective of their own wishes and inclinations” (“A Borderless World?” 6). In place of nation-states, Miyoshi warns that transnational corporations, some of whose net assets exceed the gross domestic products of more than half of the countries of the world (15), “will increasingly require from all workers loyalty to the corporate identity rather than to their own national identities” (17). “The nation-state no longer works, [ . . . ] it is thoroughly appropriated by transnational corporations” that are indifferent to the regions of poverty they create or to the rights of workers (20).8 Other consequences include the loss of indigenous culture, the development of a certain homogeneity among the members of the transnational class, who become “variants of one ‘universal’—as in a giant theme park or shopping mall” (23); increased migration into “huge urban slums without the protection of a traditional rural mutual dependence system” (24); and environmental destruction as a result of industry.

Similarly, Arif Dirlik has argued that global capitalism has brought about certain universalizing phenomena since the 1980s: “global motions of people (and, therefore, cultures), the weakening of boundaries (among societies, as well as among social categories), the replications in societies internally of inequalities and discrepancies once associated with colonial differences, simultaneous homogenization and fragmentation within and across societies, the interpenetration of the global and the local, and the disorganization of a world conceived in terms of ‘three worlds’ or nation-states” (The Postcolonial Aura, 72). He notes that although global capitalism admits different cultures into the realm of capital, it is only “to break them down and to remake them in accordance with the requirements of production and consumption, and even to reconstitute subjectivities across national boundaries to create producers and consumers more responsive to the operations of capital” (72).

Among creative writers, Asian American and Asian Canadian authors have been at the forefront of the discussion about the social dimension of globalization. They have manifested particular interest in critical globality because globalization has reshaped the lives of those peoples in the south more profoundly than it has people in the north. Cultural critic Shaobo Xie warns that “the West still poses or imposes itself as the centre of the world” (“Is the World Decentered?” 55) and that “global capitalism feeds on difference to create sameness at the other end” (66). Other issues that these authors explore in their works are similar to those that have been raised by a number of economists and labor analysts. Bernhard Gunter and Rolph Van der Hoeven note that some of these include the effects of the shift in manufacturing, which has moved from industrialized countries to developing countries, and the way this shift has caused some worrying effects, including the fact that “a large number of developing countries, where 30% of the world’s population lives, have become progressively marginal to the global economy and employment and labour standards have been declining in these countries” (“The Social Dimension of Globalization,” 12); the way “globalization has increased income inequality within a country as well as across countries” (13); the fact that women and children have become more integrated into formal employment because of globalization, yet discrimination against women continues; and the reality that the participation rate of children has been detrimental to them (16). In addition, migration patterns have greatly changed: “Traditional migration channels, particularly from Europe, have dried up, while many new ones are being created, notably in South-East Asia; [ . . . ] today’s migrants increasingly come from poor countries” (18). Thus, along with globalization, Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have experienced increased geographical mobility in recent years.

In her groundbreaking study Reading Asian American Literature, published over a decade ago, Sau-ling Wong argued that “America is founded on myths of mobility,” of a nation built on expanse, wilderness, and freedom (118). She noted that American writers from the nineteenth century onward have been “drawn to images of motion expressing a range of now overlapping, now contradictory meanings—adventure, exploration, escape, home-seeking, quest, aimless meandering” (119). Similarly, Asian American literature has also been a “literature of movement, of motion” (120).9 However, the crucial difference between the two groups, according to Wong, is that one group experiences mobility as “Extravagance” while the other experiences it as “Necessity.” Whereas mainstream America experiences mobility as the “horizontal movement across the North American continent,” with connotations of “independence, freedom, an opportunity for individual actualization and/or societal renewal—in short, Extravagance,” Asian Americans associate mobility with “subjugation, coercion, impossibility of fulfillment for self or community—in short, Necessity” (121). Wong wrote, “In Asian American literature, [ . . . ] there has from the beginning been a keen collective awareness of immobility as a historical given” (123). Some examples of this paradox of mobility/immobility include the exclusion laws prohibiting Chinese from entering the country and owning land before the Second World War, the coerced movement or internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the detainment of immigrants on Angel Island,10 and the endless movement of early Filipino migrant farmworkers (123–27). Asian American mobility was particularly fraught with economic, social, and political implications during the first part of the twentieth century.

In the last ten years or so, Asian American and Asian Canadian mobility has shifted from the kind of experience based on Necessity that Sau-ling Wong has insightfully described and from the kind of migration experienced by Asian indentured workers of the nineteenth century that Lily Cho urges us to remember (in “The Turn to Diaspora”) to a more liberatory kind of practice of mobility. Mobility can still be fraught for Asian North Americans, for example, for illegal workers or refugees, but on the whole, I would argue that the boundary between what Wong described as “Extravagance” and “Necessity” has broken down considerably. Popular travel writer Pico Iyer notes: “For more and more people, then, the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings—Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos—as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafes; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the remotest point is just a click away” (The Global Soul, 10–11). Mobility for Asians in North America, as for many other peoples, is no longer mainly the politics of immobility. Statistics about immigration patterns from both the United States and Canada show that countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia are among the top four countries sending people to North America.

For the fiscal year 2003, the top countries sending legal immigrants to the United States were Mexico, India, the Philippines, and China, and since the 1990s the top countries sending immigrants to Canada have been China, India, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka, replacing the British Isles, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, which were the top sending countries in the 1950s (Migration Policy Institute, “Legal Immigration to US Still Declining,” 2; Statistics Canada, “100 Years of Immigration to Canada”). In the last decade, an unprecedented number of Asians have moved to North America, shifting the makeup of the visible minority population in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, and Vancouver. In the United States, the majority of these immigrants, about 63 percent, tend to move to and live in six states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois (Migration Policy Institute, “Legal Immigration to US Still Declining,” 2). In Canada, half of all visible minorities are expected to be either Chinese or South Asian by 2017, with the Chinese living in Vancouver and South Asians predominantly residing in Toronto (Statistics Canada, “Study”). This increase in the Asian American and Asian Canadian population, along with advances in media technology, communication, and travel, mean that the traditional divide between East and West has become less discernible. Himadeep Muppidi reminds us that “the globality that we inhabit allows us no pure non-European or non-western positions” (The Politics of the Global, 19). The consequence of global mobility and the increase in transnational links between ethnic communities within North America and also with their countries of origin are manifold. The subjectivities and sociocultural activities of this group of Asian North Americans are and will be very different from those of the earlier generation of immigrants from China and South Asia, who came primarily as laborers and did not enjoy the same kind of real and virtual diasporic communities.

One important question that interests me and is discussed in this book is the way Asian North American identities have been constructed in the past and the ways we are and ought to be representing ourselves and reconceptualizing our collective identity. In their introduction to Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, Shirley Lim, John Gamber, Stephen Sohn, and Gina Valentino contend that “Asian American literary criticism may be said to fall into distinct, although not wholly partitioned, periods and thematic categories: critical work produced prior to 1982, between 1982 and 1995, and from 1995 to the present” (5). They maintain that in the first period, introductions to anthologies “defined Asian American literature through the inclusion or exclusion of certain Asian American national groups” (6). In the second period, Asian American literary critics, such as King-Kok Cheung, Elaine Kim, Shirley Lim, Amy Ling, Stephen Sumida, and Sau-ling Wong “pushed the debate on what should constitute Asian American identity and broadened the notion of an Asian American canon” (6–7). In the last period, “contemporary Asian American criticism is traversed by theories associated with postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and discourses on globalization, diaspora, transnationalism, and postcolonialism” (8). As I see it, these divisions are less distinct in literary and cultural productions. The main change occurred around the 1990s, when creative works shifted from those that were mainly auto-ethnographic to those that are no longer tied to ethnic and national identities. There is a growing body of works with more experimental forms, structures, and content: narratives with protagonists who are either less identifiably Asian or whose plots are not primarily concerned with the struggle between the traditions of the Old and New worlds. These Asian American works mirror the changes that are taking place in the larger political, social, and global arena. In Canada, Asian Canadian literary criticism has had a more “protracted birth,” as Donald Goellnicht has observed (“A Long Labour”). Asian Canadian literature was read before the 1990s mainly as postcolonial literature, ethnic literature, or part of Canadian multicultural literature (see Goellnicht, “A Long Labour,” and Ty and Verduyn, introduction to Asian Canadian Writing). Only in the last decade or so has the term Asian Canadian been more widely used to refer to a field of study and as a category of people.

With the recent shift in demographics in both Canada and the United States, it is useful for scholars and critics to be aware of the implications of what Himani Bannerji calls the “passion of naming” (“The Passion of Naming,” 17), of the way we as critics participate in the articulation, creation, and constitution of a collective psyche or subjectivity. Bannerji argues that “the questioning and reconstructing of identities have to take place in the context of this hegemonic history—and involves situating them within their particular social, cultural and ideological relations and forms. It is also important to remember that the task is always more than one of simple negation” (28). For the same reason, Kandice Chuh calls for “conceiving Asian American studies as a subjectless discourse” in order to “create the conceptual space to prioritize difference by foregrounding the discursive constructedness of subjectivity” (Imagine Otherwise, 9). Both scholars ask that we pay attention to the way we name and characterize ourselves as a group. We need to continue to theorize ways of representation and the construction of Asian North American subjectivity that take into account the varying psychosocial, cultural, and historical experiences of this increasingly large and diverse group. In the past, coalitions have been made based on a shared history of discrimination and the experience of racism against Asian Americans and Asian Canadians. And although it is still important to remember this history and to speak of this experience, I question the efficacy of maintaining a group identity based primarily on a perpetuation of the sense of otherness and nonbelonging. Lisa Lowe has argued for the need for a practice of identity politics within Asian American discourse. She reminds us that “Asian American is not a natural or static category; it is a socially constructed unity, a situationally specific position that we assume for political reasons” (“Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity,” 39).

Diversity among Asian North Americans

I use the term Asian North American here as I did in my previous book, The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives, to indicate and highlight the general similarities in historical treatment, experiences, cultural categorization, and social perception of subjects we call Asian Americans and Asian Canadians.11 For many literary critics and scholars, the term Asian American already implies or encompasses Asian North American rather than just the United States. For example, King-Kok Cheung defined Asian American literature “as works by people of Asian descent who were either born in or who have migrated to North America” in her useful volume An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, published over a decade ago. The works of Asian Canadian writers and filmmakers such as the Eaton sisters, Joy Kogawa, Richard Fung, and Shani Mootoo are often simply studied under the rubric of Asian American or South Asian American literature (see Wong, Reading Asian American Literature; Eng and Hom, Q & A; and Srikanth, The World Next Door). Several Asian North American authors have affiliations with both the United States and Canada: Bharati Mukherjee has lived in both countries; Larissa Lai was born in California but now lives in Vancouver; Ruth Ozeki, (half) Japanese American, now resides in Vancouver. Cheung notes that “Asian American literature” itself has evolved from an initial focus on writings by people of “Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese descent” to include writings by Americans of Bangladeshi, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian, Laotian, Nepali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Vietnamese descent” (2, 3). In the introduction to her study of South Asian American literature published in 2004, Rajini Srikanth defines “South Asian American” as a “category that encompasses those individuals in the United States and Canada whose ancestral origins lie in one or more of these seven countries . . . Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka” (1). With the heightened awareness of the Middle East after 9/11, there have also been a number of attempts to include West Asia under the rubric of Asian America, for instance, at sessions in conferences, such as those of the Association for Asian American Studies. Under “Asian Canadians” in Wikipedia, in addition to the already mentioned groups, Armenian, Arab, Lebanese, Iranian, Iraqi, Assyrian, Syrian, and Afghan Canadians are included among the various ethnic groups (“List of Canadians of Asian Ancestry”). The inclusion of West Asia under Asian North American is still not a common practice, for some scholars of the Middle Eastern diaspora prefer to be in the category “Arab and Arab American studies” (see Abdulhadi, Naber, and Alsultany, Introduction to Gender, Nation, and Belonging).

For the works that I am examining, the term Asian North American, encompassing East, Southeast, and South Asian American and Canadian literature and film, is the most suitable for the present. The term Asian North American overtly signals the examination of works from Canada and the United States.12 A number of other terms, such as “transnational” (see Sau-Ling Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered”), “Asian diasporas in the Americas,” or “hemispheric” (see Erika Lee, “Hemispheric Orientalism”), have been suggested to compare the situations of Asian Canadians and Asian Americans in Canada and the United States and to look at historical events that occurred in both countries. Iyko Day points out that each of these terms has particular resonances and issues in her essay, “Lost in Translation: Uncovering Asian Canada.” Day notes, “An Asian North American critical framework is both old and new. The rubric has been in use since at least the 1970s, and until recently the primary focus of this framework has been directed at empirically-based analyses of material parallels between Canada and the U.S.” (78). Donald Goellnicht (“A Long Labour”) and other Canadian scholars, such as Henry Yu (Pacific Canada) and Marie Lo (“Passing Recognition”), caution against essentializing “Asianness” and remind us that there have been some historical instances in which Asian Americans have been treated differently from Asian Canadians. For example, in her nuanced discussion of the reception of Obasan, Marie Lo points out that “how ‘Japanese’ is coded and racialized in Canada is very different from how ‘Japanese’ is coded and racialized in the United States” (“Passing Recognition,” 313). Thus, I use the term Asian North American, and also the terms Asian American and Asian Canadian, as the situation calls for. In 2000, Goellnicht urged Asian American studies to place “greater emphasis . . . on Asian diasporas rather than on ‘claiming America’” in order to build coalitions, and to “gain greater recognition from governments, cultural institutions and reading audiences at home” (“A Long Labour,” 21–22). Though I have employed the term diaspora in this study, I am also hesitant to apply it as an umbrella term, given that not all Asian North Americans feel that they belong to a “diaspora,” and not all of them have experienced the same sense of dispossession that diaspora scholars such as Safran and Cho emphasize in their definitions of the term.13

The impulse for this book and much of my work in recent years has come from the desire to respond to the calls for a “strategic alliance” (Goellnicht, “A Long Labour,” 22) between Asian Americans and Asian Canadians, a realization of the power and political necessity of solidarity or “strategic essentialism” within Asian ethnic groups (Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 82). At the same time, identities have become “unfastened” by the recent changes brought about by globality. I use the term unfastened both to refer to subjectivities that have “not been fastened” to specific nations, languages, or religions and to refer to borders—geopolitical, psychic, class, cultural, community, and social—that have “been loosened, opened, or detached” (Brown, The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). Today, in the United States and Canada, the politics and the binaries of dominant and minor, here and there, oppressor and oppressed have become more complicated. The question for scholars in the field is how to approach this panethnic group composed of Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Tamil, Thai, Cambodian, Taiwanese, Hmong, and Laotian people, all with their varying histories, classes, categories of immigration, and economic and religious backgrounds. The paradigms used to analyze and discuss the Russian, Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and other European immigrants of the first half of the twentieth century—such as immigration, settlement, acculturation, and gradual assimilation to the dominant society—are not necessarily suitable. For one thing, Asian immigrants, like blacks viewed as “people of color” or categorized as “visible minorities,” will not as easily follow the path of Irish and eastern European ethnics, who, though initially seen as “not quite white” in the mid–nineteenth century, slowly became regarded as white over the course of the twentieth century (Roediger, “Whiteness and Ethnicity,” 329).14 At the same time, other groups, such as Asian Indians and Mexicans, though partially identified as white became nonwhite in the United States (326). As critics of white studies note, whiteness, in part, was made possible only by the distinction made between Europeans and blacks and, to a lesser extent, Asians, who were figured as other and therefore nonwhite (see Koshy, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity,” 156, 165, 185–86). We are the “others” who make white identity possible.

Another problem within the field of Asian American and Asian Canadian studies that did not occur in the case of European immigrants is the rapid shift of demographics in the post-1970s group of immigrants. The accelerated pace of new immigrants from countries such as China and India in recent years means that there is less chance that a stable body of Asians can settle in and become absorbed by the existing communities around them. What Douglas Massey notes as the difference in the pattern of earlier European immigrants and those of Asian and Latin American immigrants in the United States is applicable also to the situation in Canada. Massey notes that for European immigrants, there was a hiatus in their immigration between 1931 and 1970, “which allowed the slow social processes that aid assimilation to take effect,” as well as a period of economic expansion which made economic and social mobility easier. These conditions do not exist for Asian and Latin American immigrants (quoted by Koshy in “Morphing Race into Ethnicity,” 189). In the United States, the Asian American population experienced the fastest growth rate from 1980 to 1990, as well as from 1990 to 2000. Latinos and Hispanics had the second-fastest growth rate, while the growth rate for whites was the lowest (Le, “Population Statistics and Demographics”). In Canada, there was similarly a decrease of immigrants from European countries after the 1980s and a corresponding increase of immigrants from Asian countries. New waves of Asian immigrants encourage the maintenance of healthy ethnic and diasporic Asian communities. In addition, the advances in telecommunications and travel mean that transnational networks between immigrants and their homelands can be maintained, so that there is less need for the kind of assimilation into WASP culture that European immigrants experienced. Today, roughly 50 percent of Asian Canadians are born outside of Canada, compared to less than 20 percent of ethnic Europeans. In 2000, 68.9 percent of Asian Americans were born in foreign countries, compared to 11.1 percent of the total U.S. population that was foreign-born (Lai and Arguelles, The New Face of Asian Pacific America, 30). These differences will have a great impact on the formation of the ethnic identity of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians, who are less bound by physicality, by geography, and by national affiliations than the European immigrants.

One notable difference between the United States and Canada is the “official” attitude toward people of Asian origins. Although Asian Americans are positioned in a bipolar place between “black” and “white” in the United States (see Okihiro, “Is Yellow Black or White?” 75), Asian Canadians are placed in the category of “visible minorities” in Canada’s official governmental discourse. This category, which racializes Asian Canadians, is a legislated classification that groups all non-Caucasians, including Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, South Asians, Nigerians, Jamaicans, and Ethiopians, as other.15 In the United States, although Asian Americans, who are favorably compared to blacks and Latinos but stereotyped in the process, deal with the consequences of the “model minority” myth, in Canada other issues, such as the efficacy of the official Multiculturalism Act, have been the subjects of lively debates in discussions about race. Some criticize Canada’s policy of official multi-culturalism because they see its function as the management of differences. For example, Kogila Moodley argues that Canadian multiculturalism promotes a “festive aura of imagined consensus” (as quoted by Eva Mackey in The House of Difference, 66). C. Mullard points out that the model highlights the “three S’s: saris, samosas, and steel bands” in order to diffuse the “three R’s: resistance, rebellion, and rejection” (as quoted by Mackey, 66).16

In addition to rapidly changing demographics, the widely different economic, social, and religious backgrounds of immigrants of the last twenty years have also rendered it more difficult to talk about Asian Americans and Asian Canadians as a group. In the last twenty years, with the rise of transnational corporations and the dynamic economic growth of countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia, it is no longer possible to speak of Third World countries and people with the implication of poverty and backwardness (see Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 6). As Ien Ang notes, Asia “is touted as the model for an affluent, hypermodern future, not the residue of a traditional and backward past, as classic Orientalism would have it” (6). Susan Koshy points out the need to look more closely at differences in class positions within national communities in Asian America:

The increase and mobility of Asian capital across national boundaries, and the entry of Asians into the technical-managerial class has created a situation where Asian America is a site of both resistance and exploitation. This is particularly problematic because the exploitation of Asian sweatshop workers, restaurant workers, and migrant workers by small and large Asian capital often deploys the discourse of ethnic and family loyalty to enforce discipline and extract compliance. In addition, the postindustrial forms of historic abuses such as slavery have assumed gigantic dimensions in the transnational era and flourish within closed national and diasporic networks that are difficult to penetrate. (“Morphing Race into Ethnicity,” 163)

As Kandice Chuh notes, “‘Oppression,’ ‘marginalization,’ and ‘resistance,’ keywords in dominant narratives of Asian American studies, are terms that each require redefinition within this globalized context, as ‘by whom’ and ‘against what’ are questions that are increasingly difficult to answer with certitude” (Imagine Otherwise, 7).

New Spaces for Asian North Americans

Other scholars have a more positive view of the effects of globalization and mobility on diasporic communities. Patrick Imbert believes that instead of fighting over territories, which are finite geographical spaces linked to roots, we should conceive of spaces as “locations,” which are knowledge-based, “geo-symbolic displacements” (Converging Disensus, 17). According to his definition, location “has more to do with ‘taking place’ than with ‘having a place’” and is “produced out of interaction, exchange, and by confronting alterity” (17–18). New wealth is created from polycultural and transcultural connections, from being able to negotiate in different languages and with a number of global and local communities. Imbert welcomes what he calls “economic liberalism” and expansion, describing the affirmative effects of a future based on “location” instead of territorialization: “location becomes a site of contacts in progress where there is room for surprise, difference, productivity, and the capacity to be efficient in different environments” (34).

Robin Cohen is similarly encouraging about globalization. He outlines five aspects of globalization that have “opened up new opportunities for diasporas to emerge, to survive and thrive.” These include

a world economy with quicker and denser transactions between its subsectors due to better communications, cheaper transport, a new international division of labour, the activities of transnational corporations and the effects of liberal trade and capital-flow policies; forms of international migration that emphasize contractual relationships, family visits, intermittent stays abroad and sojourning, as opposed to permanent settlement and the exclusive adoption of the citizenship of a destination country; the development of “global cities” in response to the intensification of transactions and interactions between the different segments of the world economy and their concentration in certain cities whose significance resides more in their global, rather than in their national, roles; the creation of cosmopolitan and local cultures promoting or reacting to globalization; and a deterritorialization of social identity challenging the hegemonizing nation-states’ claim to make an exclusive citizenship a defining focus of allegiance and fidelity in favour of overlapping, permeable and multiple forms of identification. (Global Diasporas, 157)

Unlike Dirlik and Miyoshi, Imbert and Cohen are optimistic about many of the changes brought about by globalization. For example, Cohen believes that “by being attached to a strong and tightly integrated diaspora, family-and kin-based economic transactions are made easier and safer” (160). In terms of space, he notes that “members of diasporas are almost by definition more mobile than people who are rooted in national spaces. They are certainly more prone to international mobility and change their places of work and residence more frequently” (168–69).

Instead of seeing all post-1965 Asian immigrants to America and Canada as victims of oppression, as “exiles” (Campomanes) or those caught “between worlds” (Ling, Between Worlds), I aim to locate them somewhere between the conditions proposed by Miyoshi and those proposed by Cohen. I would like to conceive of them as “unfastened,” mobile subjects in a global age. Anthropologist Aihwa Ong has suggested the term “flexible citizenship” as a way of describing Chinese businessmen who are able to develop a “flexible notion of citizenship and sovereignty as strategies to accumulate capital and power” (Flexible Citizenship, 6). Regarding them, Ong notes: “In their quest to accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena, subjects emphasize, and are regulated by, practices favoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments, and cultural regimes” (6). As useful as Ong’s theories are for discussing capitalist entrepreneurs, the paradigm does not describe the experience of large numbers of Filipinos who move across the globe as migrant workers, domestics, and health care and hospitality workers (see Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 18).17 Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild note that not only has globalization been responsible for the “female executives” jetting “about the world” that we see in TV commercials; the process of globalization has also caused a “far more prodigious flow of female labor and energy: the increasing migration of millions of women from poor countries to rich ones, where they serve as nannies, maids, and sometimes sex workers” (Global Woman, 2). Ong’s notion of flexible citizenship also has limited application to the many South Asians who come to America and Canada with skills and training that they are unable to use and end up working at low-paying jobs. James Clifford observes that “travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity” and that human location is “constituted by displacement as much as by stasis” (Routes, 2). Terms such as dislocation and displacement usually have a negative connotation, suggesting refugees, exiles, temporary workers, and other unsettled immigrants. I would like to use them in more encompassing ways, not just having to do with moving from one’s originary culture but also with traveling out of one’s usual place of habitation, as Clifford does. Though many Asian North Americans are displaced, in the negative sense, and work at marginal jobs, there are also increasing numbers of professionals and entrepreneurs who attain comfortable economic and social status in Canada and the United States. Although a number of narratives by Asian Americans and Asian Canadians depict feelings or a state of restlessness or unbelonging, not everyone experiences dislocation or displacement the same way. I would like to use and recuperate the terms mobility and displacement without mis-representing the place of Asian North Americans as a whole by situating them in a position of always not at home and marginal. Displacement as perpetual exile and unbelonging goes against the strategy of “claiming America” by and for Asian Americans,18 while displacement as movement, that is, taking the place of something else, suggests agency and subjectivity. Asian North Americans are not always put in situations not of their own volition.

The novels, plays, and films I have chosen to examine in this study depict protagonists who experience much movement between cultures, social classes, communities, nations, and continents. Not only do raw materials, goods, and products move much more today because of globalization; people, cultural practices, and ideological beliefs do, too. Extending the work of recent literary and cultural scholars who have looked at contemporary cross-cultural and minority works using discourses of the transnational, diasporic, postcolonial, and cosmopolitanism (see Lim, Transnational Asian American Literature; Kamboureli, Scandalous Bodies; Miki, “Altered States”; and Rajan and Sharma, New Cosmopolitanisms), my project focuses on texts and films that overtly thematize globality, global movements, and their effects on the everyday. Although many of these works reveal the inequality brought about by globalization, not all of the movements or displacements are negative. One useful way of approaching these texts is through James Clifford’s notion of travel as a “complex range of experiences: practices of crossing and interaction that troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture” (Routes, 3). Instead of viewing travel simply as a supplement to social existence, Clifford suggests that we see “practices of displacement” as “constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension [. . .]. Cultural centres, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things” (3). Clifford’s notion of travel encompasses “the worldly historical routes which both constrain and empower movements across borders and between cultures” (6). He notes that since 1900 practices of crossing “have been powerfully inflected by three connected global forces: the continuing legacies of empire, the effects of unprecedented world wars, and the global consequences of industrial capitalism’s disruptive, restructuring activity” (6–7).

Using Clifford’s paradigm to look at the mobility of Asian North Americans has the advantage of allowing us to see what Viet Nguyen, in another context, calls the “flexible strategies” of Asian American authors. In Race and Resistance Nguyen argues that by focusing mainly on resistance and accommodation, Asian American intellectuals have ignored the “flexible strategies that concern struggle, survival, and possible assimilation” shown in Asian American literature (5). Similarly, what I would like to stress in my study are the different ways of reading, interpreting, and understanding globality and the global movement of Asian North Americans in the twentieth century. Instead of seeing Asian North Americans simply as fatalities of globalization, I want to look at how globalization and travel have pushed them to seek new spaces, both geographically and psychically; to renegotiate identities; and to search for alliances with other marginal ethnic, racial, or gendered subjects. Globalization has both constrained and empowered Asian North Americans, as Clifford has noted. Yet what has not been studied or theorized enough is the way Asian North Americans have also been travelers, explorers, and the subject of quest narratives. Clifford writes that “in the dominant discourses of travel, a nonwhite person cannot figure as a heroic explorer, aesthetic interpreter, or scientific authority [ . . . ]. Victorian bourgeois travelers, men and women, were usually accompanied by servants, many of whom were people of color. These individuals never achieved the status of ‘travelers’” (Routes, 33). Even in the twentieth century, Asians who travel across the globe are represented as migrant laborers, sojourners, refugees, or, at best, immigrants. Yet their travels—whether they be for work, to join families, for study, or for leisure—have reshaped the face of metropolitan cities across North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe, and even within Asia.

Even as I use the term mobility, I am aware that travel and displacement can mean very different things to different people depending on their economic and political capital. Pheng Cheah cautions, for instance, against too strong a celebration of mobility and points out that “Clifford endows cosmopolitan mobility with a normative dimension, claiming for it an important role in cultural and political transformation [. . .]. Cosmopolitan movements are presented as exemplary instances of active resistance to localism and cultural homogenization under global capitalism” (Inhuman Conditions, 87). One objection Cheah has to critics, such as Clifford and Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture), who highlight the powers of hybridity and mobility, is that hybridity, enabled partly by mobility, is a “theory of resistance that reduces the complex givenness of material reality to its symbolic dimensions and underplays the material institution of capitalist oppression at a global systemic level” (Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 94). I agree with Cheah’s reservation against relying too much on the symbolic power of hybridity and with his point that cultural hybridity does not automatically lead to a realm of “flux and freedom” (89). Yet, over the last twenty or thirty years we have seen many significant and energizing changes that have resulted from the kind of cultural resistance described by Clifford and Bhabha and from what Arjun Appadurai calls “the work of imagination” (Modernity at Large, 5–7). Discussing the effects of migration, Appadurai points out that “diasporas bring the force of the imagination, as both memory and desire, into the lives of many ordinary people, into mythographies different from the disciplines of myth and ritual of the classic sort [ . . . ]. These new mythographies are charters for new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life” (6). What many Asian North American narratives thematize is the fluidity of contemporary transcultural identities and the layering of subject positions within that identity. The mobility suggested here is not necessarily a physical one but can also be one of movement through social, cultural, or psychic scapes.

These recent narratives, in the form of plays or films, whether realist, postmodern, or science fiction, tell stories that are no longer simply about the tensions between the older generation and Westernized youths, about Asian American identity and assimilation, but encompass a wide range of subjects and forms. They depict relations not only between Asian Americans and dominant white culture but also between Asian Americans, Asian Canadians, and members of other ethnicities, and they often use postmodernist techniques—of parody, exaggeration, irony, and/or a decentered narrator—rather than primarily realist narratives. The narratives produced in the last decade by Asian Americans and Asian Canadians question, play with, and disrupt the genre, themes, and trajectory of the ethnic autobiography and at the same time expand our notions of what constitutes being Asian in North America. In provocative and playful ways, these authors treat their Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, or Indian culture not as an intrinsically inherited cultural identity but as something that is learned, reiterated, and “performed,” in Butler’s sense of the term (Bodies That Matter, 95). They show how the subjectivities of Asian people in America and Canada are constituted by what Ien Ang calls “a discursive construct” of Asianness that “operates in practice, in different historical, geographical, political and cultural contexts” (On Not Speaking Chinese, 40). “Asian American” or “Asian Canadian” are terms of identification; each is a choice, albeit somewhat constrained, rather than a pre-given identity. Often in North America, Asianness is represented simply as one aspect of the character’s life and is not stereotyped or exoticized. At the same time, many Asian North American authors are concerned with issues that have emerged as a result of the recent phenomenon of globalization. Many of their narratives explicitly or implicitly critique such problems as global capitalism, corporatization, and the transnational exploitation of labor.

I limit my discussion in this project to works that consciously explore the impact of globalization on Asian North Americans, as well as their condition of globality. Although a number of these works, such as those by Kwa, Keller, and Kuruvilla, are set in time periods that predate the last twenty years of intense globalization, they nevertheless manifest the attitude of “critical globality.” All the authors convey how globalization and travel have changed the particularities of the world we live in by depicting local and quotidian practices, by giving details of the joys, pains, disappointments, and pleasures of the everyday. Through the sights, smells, tastes, and tactility of the everyday world, these authors and filmmakers express the ways Asian North Americans have handled, negotiated with, manipulated, and even enjoyed their mobility in the globalized world. Michel de Certeau has argued that “many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character” (The Practice of Everyday Life, xix). De Certeau distinguishes between a “strategy,” which requires a subject’s “will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution)” versus a “tactic,” which “cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a border-line distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other” (xix).

My concern with looking at the tactics deployed in Asian North American works and my focus on the everyday have also been inspired by feminists who seek heroism not in great epic battles but in the ordinary. For example, feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver, influenced by Julia Kristeva, discusses the importance of recognizing female geniuses. She explains that in Female Genius Kristeva suggests “that genius and geniuses are necessary for psychic life: we need geniuses to validate the exceptional within our own lives, which is as true for women as it is for men” (The Colonization of Psychic Space, 159). Oliver points out, however, that the possibility of creativity and sublimation, which she describes as the transfer of bodily affects into signification—poetry, prose, philosophy, music, physics, and so on—is “missing from the lives of girls and women and other marginalized people insofar as they are circumscribed by values, meanings, and images that foreclose their agency as meaning makers” (161). In order to rectify this problem and to decolonize our psychic space, she suggests that we look for the excesses and singularity of the everyday. Oliver writes, “The flavors and textures of everyday life can give meaning and joy if they are valued and have meaning within culture. Food, clothes, home, garden, beautiful and functional domestic spaces can be valued and even display female genius, the extraordinary within the ordinary” (164). Applying Oliver’s notion of singularity to Asian North American cultural productions, we see how Asian North Americans are able to find ways to use and reinscribe available meanings and to transform local, social spaces within an increasingly globalized culture.

My approach to these texts is indebted to insights and energies developed by these and other feminist, cultural, critical race, gender, socio–anthropological, diasporic, postcolonial, and Asian North American studies of the last two decades. The areas of these studies provide oppositional practices and theoretical paradigms that are useful to the examination of the powerful effects of globalization in contemporary culture. They tend to link the everyday and the small with the global and the large. In the 1980s, for example, even before the discourse of “global/local,” feminists proclaimed their belief that “the personal is the political.” This attitude, linking local practices and beliefs to public, national, continental, and global ones, is still a cornerstone of many groups of cultural workers and is one of the reasons I focus on everyday lives and everyday practices in this study. In globalization studies, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake observe, “If local struggles figure as allegories of larger, more systemic alteration, then part and whole will have to be rethought and reimagined as figuring the contemporary world-system of global capital in all its concreteness” (Global/Local, 7). At the same time, I take heed of Arif Dirlik’s caution that “the local is valuable as a site for resistance to the global, but only to the extent that it also serves as the site of negotiation to abolish inequality and oppression inherited from the past, which is a condition of any promise it may have for the future” (“The Global in the Local,” 38). Unfastened examines novels, plays, and films by Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that speak to some of the most urgent questions raised by local/global developments in multicultural North American society.

Critical Readings

The texts I have chosen to study here are those narratives published in the last decade that highlight issues brought about by global mobility and transcultural exchanges. These are some of the most exciting literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts currently being produced, not just within the field of Asian North American but in contemporary culture. The book engages with existing discussions of Asian North American or global literature and theories of globalization. I have deliberately avoided earlier canonical texts of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature, such as those by Bulosan, Kingston, Kogawa, Chin, and Hagedorn, because those authors belong to a different generation of autoethnographers and have been much discussed by critics already (see, for example, Sau-Ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature; Rachel Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature; David Li, Imagining the Nation; and others). In this project I am interested in bringing more attention to less-known contemporary authors who have produced fascinating and critically absorbing works. Many of them are women who seek alternatives to the telling of the story as well as to the postmodern narrative of progress; they wish to find other options besides lifestyles based on capitalism and consumption. Most of them are critical of the effects of global migration; some, however, represent the creative and fruitful potential of globality and movement.

In Part 1, “Doing Global Dirty Work,” the four novels I discuss reveal the detrimental effects of movements across continents or between countries. The protagonists in Brian Roley’s American Son and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao move from the south to the north because of their desire to ameliorate their economic conditions, to escape the poverty of the Philippines. In both these novels the young male protagonists resort to cheating, theft, and violence in order to cope with their lives in America, which have been changed by transnational migration. The young adults in the novels see themselves as failures because their everyday lives do not match up to their high expectations of the American dream. Their only sense of empowerment comes from the criminal lives they lead. As Inderpal Grewal notes, “Imaginaries of ‘America’ were divergent and various, and this conjunction of consumer cultures and democratic rights cultures traveled to many regions outside of the United States” (Transnational America, 9). Although these boys do not achieve economic or social success in America, they nevertheless are able to negotiate power within the limited sociocultural sphere in which they live. In Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence, the Asian Canadian protagonist looks back in history to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when hundreds of Chinese girls were lured from their villages in rural China and brought to Singapore to work as prostitutes, or ah ku, to service the large population of male coolie workers there.19 Through the protagonist’s imagination, Kwa commemorates the lives of these girls from a hundred years ago, who became virtual slaves in their brothels. Kwa’s novel draws parallels between the present-day narrator’s sense of dislocation and the two ah ku, whose names the author finds in a historical document. She links her protagonists through the use of objects and repetition, through their lesbian desires, depicting the prostitutes as heroines with lives and interests rather than as simply victims. Her novel acts as a kind of witnessing or testimonial to the thousands whose travels and travails have been forgotten and whose lives were not properly documented.

As Clifford notes, war has been one of the primary reasons for travel and dislocation (Routes, 6–7). American involvement in Korea during the Korean War (1950–53) and the continued presence of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula caused the movement and relocation of numerous Korean women who were enticed into working as prostitutes on American military bases in South Korea. In Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, these women and their children, often born of American fathers, live in Korea’s America Town, one of a number of camptowns where foreigners and foreign habits dominate. The camptown existence can be seen as a quintessential example of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “contact zones, social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (Imperial Eyes, 4). The camptown is a hybridized space of America and Korea where American soldiers temporarily make their homes and where Korean women live a precarious existence based mainly on their sexuality. In Fox Girl Keller shows the degradation of these Korean women, who are treated like animals and whose work is sanctioned by the local authorities as well as the American military. For them a globalized way of life has only highlighted the unequal power structures of this not-quite-America, not-quite-Korea contact zone. At the end of the novel, the protagonist escapes and travels to Hawaii. It is there that she is able to break free of the predictable pattern of life of the camptown woman.

In Part 2, “Performing and Negotiating Transcultural Identities,” I look at four different texts that explore ways of navigating between Asian and North American traditions and values. What is different about these works is that the first two, Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue and Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy, add the dimension of disability to familiar ethnic issues of acculturation, immigration, and transcontinental movement. The teenage boy in Quan’s play, who is deaf and mute and speaks in American Sign Language, highlights the social, psychological, and other barriers faced by those who cannot “speak” and easily communicate in the language of the dominant culture. In the play, travel is not only from the Old World, China, to the New World, Canada, but also across North America. The boy with deafness is faced with the frightening prospect of loss and of being left behind because of his sister’s desire to travel. In Kuruvilla’s play, mobility is signaled by having a stage with simultaneous settings in India and Canada. A girl in India, intelligent but with a disability, with limited mobility and prospects, is juxtaposed against minoritized figures in Canada whose lives are also circumscribed by their religious affiliations, race, or ethnicity. Both plays depict stories of growing up in a globalized world where ethnic identities do not follow pre-given scripts but must be constantly negotiated and performed.

The other two works discussed in this part of the book signal a more playful interaction of cultures in contemporary society. Nina Aquino and Nadine Villasin’s play Miss Orient(ed) and Deepa Mehta’s film Bollywood/Hollywood, both set in Toronto, demonstrate the energetic potential of transnational connections and hybrid globalized cultures. These two works reveal the ways in which travel and cultural encounters can produce vigorous new subjectivities. In both works the authors use humor, song, and dance to reflect the ways Asian Canadians influence, and at the same time are shaped by, local diasporic communities and the dominant Western culture. The theatrical production Miss Orient(ed), for example, set in the world of the “Miss Pearl of the Orient” beauty pageant, reveals the ways in which contemporary Filipinas, who have been stereotyped, socialized, misconceptualized, and misoriented, still are able to contest the ways their bodies have been used in the diaspora. Although the bodies of these Filipinas, as beauty queens, are viewed nostalgically as the embodiment of the lost motherland, their revamping of Filipino dances, customs, and beliefs demonstrates a comic questioning of these traditions. The contestants’ staging of their racialized and gendered bodies demonstrates the performativity of these identities. The setting of the beauty pageant is significant, because it is a site where the diasporic community gathers to collectively celebrate and reflect on their imagined homeland. It also has much potential for mobility, because it brings together diasporic peoples of various socioeconomic classes. A beautiful and talented woman not necessarily from an upper class can be “crowned” and elevated to the position of queen. At least within the beauty pageant community for that year, the beauty queen reigns supreme.

Deepa Mehta also looks at some of these questions in her parodic film Bollywood/Hollywood. With its Bollywood and Hollywood musical style that includes dancing, singing, and colorful sets, the film creates a carnivalesque atmosphere where a politics of transgression becomes possible within a popular genre. With this film Mehta brings the popular Hindi genre of the Bollywood musical into the North American mainstream cinema and video industry, equating Bollywood movies with Hollywood romantic blockbusters such as Pretty Woman. The film critiques in a playful way various stereotypes about diasporic South Asians at the same time that it highlights the ways a diasporic community sustains itself through ritualistic performances of Indianness. Instead of depicting the lives of a struggling immigrant family, Mehta focuses on a wealthy Indian Canadian family and their romantic aspirations, reconfiguring the typical immigrant story into a fairy tale. This family takes advantage of some of the new spaces and transnational networks created by global cities, as described by Robin Cohen and Patrick Imbert.

In Part 3 of the book, “Future Perfect: Feminist Resistance to Global Homogeneity,” I look at four books that do not use realism as a primary mode of narration to represent or critique our globalized world. In both Asian American Chitra Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices and Asian Canadian Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, which use fantasy and magic realism, the female protagonists, a spice vendor and a rebellious young woman with a disability, are marginal figures who use “tactics” rather than strategies to subvert the existing global capitalist order. Both novels feature female protagonists who are shape shifters, endowed with the ability to transcend geographical as well as temporal boundaries. Divakaruni and Lai use familiar cityscapes, such as Oakland, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia, respectively, but they defamiliarize the locations; in Lai’s case, the city becomes a futuristic dystopia. They use myths and stories from their cultures, transporting them into these contemporary or futuristic settings, thwarting readers’ expectations of the genres of European, Chinese, and Indian myths and legends as well as our preconceptions of how females in these stories are supposed to act. Both protagonists employ what de Certeau calls “tactics” to subvert their conquerors’ or masters’ laws from within, “not by rejecting them or by transforming them, [ . . . ] but by many different ways of using them in the service of rules, customs or convictions foreign to the colonization which they could not escape” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 32).

Similarly, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation subvert global capitalism and notions of productivity and consumption at the same time that they critique our misuse of the environment by their employment of myths, science fiction, and/or science. Both novels challenge stereotypes of the model minority Asian American, especially Japanese North American docility, through their creation of barely functional but rebellious heroines. And both novels evaluate the influence of the traditional nuclear family by questioning the authority of patriarchs and their parallels in the business world, corporate managers or presidents of companies. These works at once reveal the powerful influence of technology and capitalist enterprise in our daily lives and show means of resistance for those who seem to be disenfranchised.

I conclude the book with a coda (“Rethinking the Hyphen”) that opens up the possibility of Asian global literature. As more Asians in the diaspora inhabit transnational spaces, they affiliate themselves—psychically, socially, if not legally—with more than one country or community. Using examples from a number of “cosmopolitan” Asian authors, such as Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, and Ang Lee, I speculate whether such hyphenated terms as Asian Canadian and Asian American are still the only or best terms to use in describing Asian writers in the diaspora. Globalization, migration, and the media have changed much of the way we conceive of belonging, locations, and identities, and the categories we use to classify or sell books and to study authors in courses and scholarly works will ultimately need some more rethinking, shifting, and displacement. My book contributes to the lively and important discussions of these and other crucial issues already in progress.