An Afro-Chinese Caribbean: Cultural Cartographies of Contrariness in the Work of Antonio Chuffat Latour, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, and Patricia Powell

Abstract

...when you visit Guyana or Trinidad, you see symbolically inscribed in the faces of their peoples, the paradoxical 'truth' of Christopher Columbus' mistake: you can find 'Asia' by sailing west, if you know where to look! -Stuart Hall1 Indeed, one could find Asia in the Caribbean. The globality of diasporic flows, peoples, ideas, and cultures has transformed how we think of national cartographies and area histories. In the case of Asian diasporas to the Americas, Asians founded a settlement in New Orleans in 1763. This first community was a fishing village created by Filipinos who escaped their Spanish colonizers. The following century brought and Indians in massive numbers to the Americas and to the Caribbean. Historically, the are especially known in migration studies as global diasporics who travelled to and remained in all parts of the world, with longstanding histories in South Africa, Australia, Canada, Peru, Hawaii, the Caribbean, and elsewhere- a mapping too expansive to be briefly summarized. migrations also have multiple tracings, with cultural hybridities crisscrossing the world, such as in the life-story of a Trinidadian who travelled to China to support Sun Yat-Sen. In 1944, Trinidadian-born Eugene Chen died while under house arrest in Shanghai, after devoting decades to anti-imperialist activities and revolutionary change in China. Chen was born Eugene Bernard Acham in Port-of-Spain in 1878. Yet he would leave Trinidadian life, travel to China, and assume an influential role in one of the twentieth century's most tumultuous and far-reaching revolutions. The story of an intellectual of transoceanic and hybrid lineages, underscores the globality of diasporic histories, wherein cultures and politics are hybrid, local, and global at the same time. Obvious questions arise regarding the notion of Chinese-ness in the story of questions that suggest a configuration of diaspora outside of traditional paradigms of Asian ethnic markers. Perhaps Chen could be representative of essential as he returned to China and devoted his life to its politics. On the other hand, the romantic (and problematic) notions of and origin could be countered by querying: how much of his life work was the result of his character and vision as formed in Trinidadian context? Biographical details reveal that Eugene Bernard Acham was of Afro-Chinese descent and that he married a creole Trinidadian with whom he had four children2 The cultural capital of ethnic inheritance, of Acham being renamed Chen, masks the equally vital cultural capital of being a Trinidadian whose habits, passions, and views, were shaped outside China. An examination of the in the Caribbean begs the question of who is and what is Chinese. The messiness of ethnic and national identifications, and their manifestations in creole cultures, requires an inclusive and broad sense of what being Chinese constitutes, along with a measured skepticism toward homogeneity and essentialized authenticity. A questioning of authenticity appears in several novels and histories of the Caribbean. Some offer suggestive portrayals of what I call contrarian diasporic identity. In three instances, two contemporary novels and a rare communal biography, portraits of identity are tied directly to the coolie, a subject of labour history that is still largely absent from aesthetics, creative works, and productions of national culture. The three works offer complex interpretations of diasporic identity, its relation to national culture and nineteenth century subjugation.3 Contrariness and Disloyalty: Margaret Cezair-Thompson and Patricia Powell Jamaican novelist Margaret Cezair-Thompson marks an instance of contrary Chinese-ness, when a character of her novel True History of Paradise is on his deathbed. It is upon death that we anticipate the comforting tropes of return and reconciliation, yet it is with death that Cezair-Thompson troubles these expectations and rites of cultural and national belonging. …