Editorial Comment: Minor Asias

Abstract

Editorial Comment: Minor Asias Sean Metzger September 2017, dusk: a black woman, hair sculpted into a high coronet on her head with an eye mask of caked white powder and a shimmery navy blue, floor-length dress with a high stand collar, entered the inner courtyard of the Pico House, a historical landmark and once the most lavish nineteenth-century hotel in what is now downtown Los Angeles.1 Constructed at the behest of Pío de Jesús Pico, a businessman who was also the last Mexican governor of Alta California, the Pico House is now a historic monument that reminds visitors of the complicated colonial dynamics that shaped the history of the state. It also stands near the site where a group of Chinese migrants had been lynched in 1871 during one of the city’s periods of civil disorder. The building thus marks a crossroads, an intersection where racial politics have eventuated across time. On this particular evening, the woman in question, visual artist and performer María Magdalena Campos-Pons, activated this location as a site of memory.2 However, the historian Pierre Nora, who coined the term lieux de mémoire, tends to privilege the national in his writings, and Campos-Pons shifted consideration away from that rubric. She evoked instead the legacies of the coolie network that once linked California, China, and Cuba. Using a stalk of sugar cane to untangle strips of cobalt-colored cloth bundled together (see the back cover of this issue), she incanted several phrases while engaging in slow, seemingly ritualistic movements. Eventually, Campos-Pons offered several gifts to the audience standing before her. A Cuban woman of Chinese and Nigerian descent, Campos-Pons used cane to evoke the plantation system that brought different sets of her ancestors across the Atlantic or the Pacific respectively to the Americas. Many people in the audience could also point to such conjunctions among their kin, as several of us could trace genealogies to the labor attendant to and surrounding the cultivation of sugar.3 As anthropologist Anna Tsing has written, globalization is a history of social projects that might be traced through the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” that might “give grip to universal aspirations.”4 In this case, the performance referenced the harvesting and shipping of sugary substances [End Page xiii] now and in the past: the manufacture of a global sweet tooth on the backs of African and Asian laborers.5 Campos-Pons complicated the site in which she moved, suggesting how it might have been transected by flows of people and goods that the official narratives of Pico House did not highlight in the colonial archive they detailed. By conducting this performative opening for the “Circles and Circuits II: Contemporary Chinese Caribbean Art” exhibition with an embodied repertoire that supplemented dominant histories, Campos-Pons identified and helped to construct a community that included a number of scholars, artists, patrons, and spectators invested in the residue of cultural contact across and beyond the Antillean archipelago. Indeed, the artwork and those who produced and/or commented on it addressed questions about Chinese flows in and through the Caribbean from a number of different perspectives: insular (analyzing an individual island or a comparison of islands); archipelagic (following Édouard Glissant’s theorization of rélation and its reverberations in his contemporaries as well as more recent turns); diasporic; and hemispheric.6 All of these ways of seeing Campos-Pons’s performance would highlight specific aesthetic, familial, racial, and regional connections that it rendered legible. Nevertheless, despite the utility of all these methodological approaches, something else seemed to emerge from those moments that none of these analytical tools quite captured for me. For example, Campos-Pons’s multiple minoritarian subject positions as Asian and black and Latinx within the context of the places she has lived (Canada, Cuba, and the United States) opened a different mode of conceptualizing cultural contact, one that evokes both nation-states and regions (like the Caribbean or the Western hemisphere) but also exceeds them. Individuals like Campos-Pons might further identify with multiple diasporas that become meaningful in relation to particular conditions. As one illustration, the Chinese elements integrated into...