“What did any of it have to do with race?”: Raced chronotopes in Cristina García's Monkey Hunting

Abstract

The question quoted in the title of this article expresses the bafflement of Chen Pan – the main character in Cristina García's novel Monkey Hunting (2003), who migrates from China to Cuba in 1857 in search of riches – as he witnesses the systematic killing of Afro-Cuban rebels during the 1912 Race War. Contrary to Chen Pan's naive outlook on race relations during the formation of the Cuban nation, García's novel, as the author of this article argues, offers detailed accounts of unequal access to civil rights and citizenship due to emerging patterns of racialization that overshadow the relationships among the novel's individual characters and their relationship to the various geopolitical locations they occupy. The author also seeks to explore in this article García's treatment of transnational relations in global societies. It is proposed that Monkey Hunting illustrates the interconnectedness of American, Asian, African and European epistemologies, and their relevance to debates about civil rights and citizenship in a global context. This is the case for Chen Pan's migration to Cuba as a contract laborer; his love relationship with Lucrecia, an Afro-Cuban slave whom he buys and then frees; their son Lorenzo, who moves to China to study herbal medicine and, while there, has three children with his second wife in China; their grandson Pipo, a short-order cook at the American naval base in Guantánamo; and, finally, his great-grandson Domingo, who enlists in the US Army and fights in the Vietnam War. Exceeding the boundaries of teleological narratives by emphasizing the tension between diasporic identity and state citizenship, the individual migration stories in García's novel raise issues about identity and belonging in a global, but nonetheless raced, world.