Reviewed by: Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific by Christopher B. Patterson Zoey Shu-Yi Chu (bio) Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, by Christopher B. Patterson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. ix + 241 pp. $32.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8135-9186-5. Reading Anglophone writing from the standpoint of Southeast Asia and its diasporas in North America, speculative fiction writer and literary scholar Christopher B. Patterson, in Transitive Cultures, illuminates the ways in which Anglophone literature of the transpacific represents, interrogates, and resists multicultural concepts of identity. By calling attention to multiculturalist identities as a vestige of colonial and imperial governance, Patterson explores issues of identity-making through Anglophone texts from Malaya (Malaysia/ Singapore), the Philippines, and their diasporic populations in Hawai'i, the mainland United States, and Canada. Attentive to Southeast Asian communities' diasporic experiences, Patterson uses a transnational and transpacific framework to reveal complex historical forces constitutive of British colonial governance in Malaysia and Singapore, American imperial networks in the Philippines, and regimes of liberal tolerance in North America. This framework allows Patterson to conceptualize what he terms "pluralist governmentality," an analytical lens that captures the biopolitical regimes of racial governance and ethnic management in sites across the Pacific (14). For Patterson, pluralist governmentality describes a configuration of imperial power that is always incorporative of new identities and ambiguities, constantly shifting in forms through mobility, history, and transition. [End Page 521] Both a rigorous comparative study of literature and a theoretically astute analysis, Transitive Cultures persuasively argues for a reframing of multiculturalism. Patterson asserts that, from the vantage point of the Southeast Asian Anglophone societies, multiculturalist ideologies operate as a direct legacy of colonialism and imperialism rather than merely the tactics of North American liberal politics. For Patterson, transpacific Anglophone literature of Southeast Asia exposes multiculturalist values of racial harmony, diversity, and tolerance in constructing identity that reiterates colonial pluralism and postcolonial multiculturalism. He further maintains that such identity formation, while being co-opted by imperial strategies of appropriation, incorporation, and social stratification, enables multifarious forms of transition to foster new imaginings of the self. Patterson spotlights these forms of transition as an ever-evolving process that shifts with every new context—a process that provides "an alternative politics of identity" (3), where a set of shifting cultural practices and conditions of identity-making "maneuvers through, rather than directly against, given identities and categorizations" (4). He terms this process "transitive culture" and traces its appearance as a theme in transpacific Anglophone literature of Southeast Asia that sees individuals as self-consciously managing multiculturalist identities and allows for a more layered and improvised subjectivity. Seeking to conceptualize a complex configuration of pluralist governmentality that has connected Southeast Asia to Asian North America and vice versa, as well as spanned from the 1960s to the present, Patterson juxtaposes authors of different genders, nationalities, and diasporas in each chapter of Transitive Cultures, rethinking different positions and contexts from what Edward W. Said has called an "exile perspective" (26). For Patterson, this perspective serves as a mode of analysis that highlights comparisons of Others to Others, rather than that of the Western imperial centers to its Others, wherein a more critical stance can be cultivated in recognizing that "those who appear victims from the U.S. vantage point can be seen as colonizers from a different view" (26). By disrupting fixed oppositions between the oppressor and the oppressed, Patterson elucidates the ways in which different viewpoints can impede or facilitate methods of reading that are imperative to understanding things not merely as what they are but how they have come to be. The book is divided into three parts with two chapters each. Each part thematically zeroes in on metahistorical novels, novels of transpacific mobility, and non-realist (speculative) genres. Both chapters in part 1: "Histories" explore how metahistorical novels forgo hegemonic state narratives of diversity and racial harmony through an infinite series of cultural transitions as a meaningful reinterpretation of identity. Chapter 1 examines Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid (1976) and Su-Chen Christine Lim's Fistful of Colours (1993) and considers [End Page 522] how these two Malaya Anglophone texts represent the region's...
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Jan 1, 2022
Van Luan Nguyen + 4
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