Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas by Quynh Nhu Le

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas by Quynh Nhu Le Xu Peng (bio) Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas, by Quynh Nhu Le. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Xiii + 250 pp. $39.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4399-1627-8. Starting with a poem that connects the Sand Creek massacre in Colorado (1864) to the massacre of Vietnamese people in My Lai (1968), Quynh Nhu Le's book Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas presents an alternative reading of the lived experience of Asian and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Responding to the vast corpus of scholarship in ethnic studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies that tends to treat Asian and Indigenous peoples as two separate subjects or objects, Le pioneers the effort in bringing these two different yet interlaced experiences together, and confronts this crossing with regard to the imposition of settler colonialism and liberal ideology. By employing a comparative approach to reading the literary representation ranging from the United States and Canada to Mexico and Brazil, she argues that Asian and Indigenous encounters have revealed the structure and the nuanced forms of "settler racial hegemonies" through "settle racial tense" (4–5). At the same time, however, the antiracial and anticolonial narratives produced by these two groups in turn are complicit in the construction and the domination of settler racial hegemonies. Le's book consists of four chapters. The first one, "Historiographical Tensions," invites us to read Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men (1980) and Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003). Through these two historiographies, Le examines the heroic and warrior traditions in U.S. Asian American and Indigenous historical narratives, which are easily integrated as the "rememorialization of their stories" (57) into "the formation and maintenance of U.S. settler colonial power" (29). Even if these stories aim to resist U.S. hegemony, they still end up obscuring "the violence on and incorporation of Asian and Indigenous peoples in U.S. settler colonial and imperial processes" (27). On [End Page 514] the other hand, by delving into the feelings and memories of the characters produced and circulated in both narratives, Le locates the "affective ruptures" (28) from which the solidarities between these two groups may develop. Chapter two shifts its attention from historical to "Legal/Juridical Tensions," and from the U.S. to the Canadian context. By reflecting upon the public apologies of two Canadian prime ministers, Brian Mulroney in 1988 and Stephen Harper in 2008, in light of Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan (1981) and Marie Clements's play Burning Vision (2012), Le calls attention to the movements and narratives of redress and reconciliation. Public apologies, in this case, provoke and justify "settler racial structures of feeling" (62) among Asian and Indigenous peoples, and eventually turn their voices into a settlement with the settler racial state, which is also shown in other literary and theatrical representations reminding us of the settler colonial grammars. In the meantime, the shared emotion of grief and grievances between these two groups are metaphorically depicted to "reveal the instabilities in settler racial hegemonies" (94). Moving from British settler colonialism to that of the Spanish and Portuguese, Le unpacks another history and presence, focusing on "Economic Tensions" in chapter three. She first refers back to José Vasconcelos's and Gilberto Freyre's critiques of mestizaje/mestiçagem discourse in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, in order to contextualize the "representations of critical resistance to global capitalist encroachment in Latin America" (96), featured in Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Through her readings, she discloses how "co-constitutive representations of Indigenous and Asian peoples" (105), in their dialogue with economic changes and global capitalism, rearticulate settler and racial legacies of discourses on mestizaje/mestiçagem. Thus, the narrative of racial mixture is limited in the sense that it fails to theoretically exhaust the tension as well as the intimacy shared by these two groups. The last chapter, "Biopolitical Tensions," strongly resonating with the lived experiences of Asian and Indigenous...