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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252098338 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2016 |
| Series: | Asian American Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Minor Intimacies of Race
Asian Publics in North America
By Christine Kim
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09833-8
CHAPTER 1
National Incompletion
Awkward Multiculturalisms and Denaturalizing Whiteness
In this chapter, I interrogate Canadian perceptions of multiculturalism in order to contextualize the demands that two contemporary Asian Canadian texts, Cindy Mochizuki's section of Vancouver-based theater company Theatre Replacement's Bioboxes (2007) and Joy Kogawa's novel The Rain Ascends (1995, 2003), levy on the multicultural nation. In this instance, multiculturalism as a regulatory matrix becomes recognizable through the subjects it simultaneously imagines and fails to recognize in practice. The first part of this chapter uses Theatre Replacement's production Bioboxes to examine how an Asian Canadian insistence on social intimacy reshapes the ideals of multiculturalism. The second section of this discussion turns to Joy Kogawa's novel The Rain Ascends to consider what happens to a nation designed in multicultural terms when whiteness is denaturalized. What are the affective and political implications for citizenship when normativity, a primary mechanism for regulating difference, is disrupted? These texts, as calls for intimacy, demand recognition in multiple ways: the first forces the audience to be physically conscious of the racialized body it shares a confined space with, and the second uses the genre of the confessional to compel the reader to witness the most mundane and personal details of the narrator's story. By experiencing discourses of multiculturalism in ways that unbundle identity and community, these texts explore new forms of political engagement for Asian Canadian publics.
Mochizuki's and Kogawa's works interrogate familiar perceptions of Canada as a multicultural nation that values diversity, promotes tolerance, and demands equality for all citizens. Multiculturalism as policy and ethos poses something of a contradiction for Canada; more precisely, given the nation's perception of itself and the existence of a democratic political framework, how do we understand the need to legislate multiculturalism in Canada — first as policy in 1971, then as part of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, and finally as an official act in 1988? In asking this question, my intention is to highlight the disparate production of citizenship, both in affective and political terms, for differently racialized Canadians, and to analyze how it is mediated by multicultural policies and attitudes. At the same time, I also consider how the language of identity enters into conversations about national identification and ethnic demands and shapes the political possibilities for visibly racialized participants. By drawing attention to the slippage between the kind of citizen imagined as being recognized as equal under the constitution, entitled to the democratic rights under the Citizenship Act, and whose linguistic rights are enshrined within the Official Languages Act (Government of Canada, "Canadian Multiculturalism Act") and the kind of citizen perceived as requiring an additional multiculturalism policy in order to participate fully and equitably within Canadian society, I suggest that the passing of such an act at the federal level underscores a profound disjuncture between the socially imagined and material practices of citizenship. As both a Canadian governmental policy and an ideology promoted within multiple countries, multiculturalism is an imperfect social model that has been critiqued, for example, as a model of inclusion, for reducing culture to diversity, and for misreading economic issues as cultural ones. By joining this conversation, my intention is to explore the limitations of multiculturalism and understand how the logic of multiculturalism regulates social and political engagement in the current moment.
My concern lies with understanding how multiculturalism obliquely legislates identity in Canada and, more specifically, how this occurs unevenly and dissimilarly for disparate groups. The deeply ingrained assumption that identity is fundamental to collective politics is visible in a number of ways (such as, for example, a low-grade but widespread anxiety about national identity, a general cultural lack ascribed to whiteness, and a perception of ethnic populations as special-interest groups), and yet it is a mistake to believe that identity structures groups and nations in a similar fashion. Approaching the identity politics of visibly racialized groups as if they are analogous to national identity obscures how whiteness, neutrality, and normativity are conventionally equated and generate forms of identity typically unrecognized within discourses of multiculturalism. Given the historically different ways in which visibly marked and unmarked groups have been collectively framed, it is unsurprising that public participation, on the levels of speech, identification, and recognition, often look and feel quite different for each of them. Historicizing multiculturalism as both an ideology and federal policy that relies on misrecognition reveals how culture is used strategically to incorporate tiered forms of citizenship into the Canadian political machinery. By examining the implications of multiculturalism, I call into question the past and present shape of politics for racialized participants, and, furthermore, lay the groundwork for imagining a form of politics not necessarily contingent upon discourses of identity and community.
The particular strategies of recognition at work in multiculturalism have been critiqued as extensions of colonial strategies for managing ethnic populations. Eva Mackey, for instance, provides an overview of the project of nation building in the Canadian context that traces a colonial trajectory from early relations between Aboriginal populations and English and French settlers up to late twentieth-century multicultural policies. Throughout these phases of Canadian history, there is a consistent practice of superficial engagement with ethnic difference that upholds rather than challenges the status quo. One critical reading of multiculturalism would be to see it as providing an idealized social fantasy that circulates globally even though it is at odds with the nation's social and economic realities. As Himani Bannerji argues, there is a profound tension between the material realities of immigrant life and governmental policies and discourses of multiculturalism. She historicizes the emergence of multiculturalism by noting that immigrants were raising issues about matters such as employment, immigration policies, racism, child care, and language. These are challenges that are "endemic to migration, and especially that of people coming in to low income jobs or with few assets. Immigrant demands were not then, or even now, primarily cultural, nor was multiculturalism initially their formulation of the solution to their problems" (44). And it is within this social fantasy of Canadian multiculturalism as a national solution that Asian publics are imagined to be part of an audience seeking social recognition.
Theatre Replacement's Bioboxes
Theatre Replacement's Japanese Biobox sounds like the ideal enactment of multiculturalism: onstage is a Japanese Canadian actor performing an immigrant narrative in a bilingual mode while the audience listens attentively. Except that in this particular staging, the actor and her single audience member are both in stage — a twenty-four by sixteen by sixteen–inch box that sits on the actor's shoulders — and the spectator is most likely preoccupied by questions such as: How should I position my knees? Where do I place my hands? Should I look away or stare into the actor's eyes? How is my breath? While these sorts of concerns about bodily negotiations are commonplace ones for people engaged in intimate acts in private places, they do not often shape public discussions of multiculturalism; both as a matter of government policy and as a national ethos, the province of multiculturalism is typically seen as constituted by rights, citizenship, and the preservation of culture. Dominant approaches to multiculturalism emphasize representation as a vexed problem that plays out in the law, on the level of government and politics, and on the national stage. By inserting intimacy into conversations about cultural politics, Theatre Replacement's staging of Bioboxes reminds us that we need to make explorations of feeling and affect part of our investigations of race, ethnicity, and culture. We need, in other words, to examine how we feel about bodies that are visibly marked as racially different, and, moreover, how we feel about being those bodies that are racially marked. By putting actor and audience within a cramped space, one that literally tries to get inside the immigrant's head, the performance compels us to contemplate how we can occupy a public that is intimately invested in racialized subjectivities and what kinds of conversations might subsequently emerge.
In January 2007, Theatre Replacement (an experimental theater company founded and codirected by Maiko Bae Yamamoto and James Long) created and produced Bioboxes for the first time, a series of six seven-minute-long monologues that explore everyday stories, multilingual realities, and issues of race and ethnicity. The scripts for this show are based on hour-long interviews with first-generation immigrants and are performed by bilingual actors of the same ethnicity. I am particularly interested in Bioboxes 's "Japanese box" (which was written and performed by Vancouver-based artist Cindy Mochizuki) given the kinds of questions it poses about race, publics, intimacy, and performances of the Asian. I note, however, that Mochizuki's was not the only enactment of Asianness, because Bioboxes also features Donna Soares's performance as the "Chinese" Biobox. Like all of the other boxes, this play engages with personal memories — all of the interviewees for Bioboxes were asked to bring three objects with stories attached that they could share with their interviewer. Yoshiyuki, a male international student and the subject of Mochizuki's Biobox, brought a bus pass, a charm, and a camera; he used these artifacts to speak at some length about being an avid photographer and the process of capturing and forgetting memories while traveling. Mochizuki reshaped Yoshiyuki's words into a monologue that explores, among other things, the desire not "to be a bird but ... to be like a bird" (Mochizuki, "Japanese Biobox"), the struggle to pose appropriately and honestly in photographs, and the anxieties associated with speaking imperfect English, which she staged against an interactive set.
While this performance is really the product of multiple collaborations — between the performer and interview subject, performer and audience, and directors and performer — the collective nature of this project might be easily overlooked because the various subject positions are performed by a single Asian Canadian body. Bioboxes, then, is a site that encourages us to seriously consider the slippage between social performativity and theatrical performance, how racialized bodies register for different viewers, and precisely how publics make meaning. What audience exists for Asian Canadian bodies not performing familiar narratives of trauma (i.e., Hiroshima or Japanese Canadian internment), but the everyday stories of individuals? And beyond the actual theatrical performance, how do these performances continue to proliferate as stories about performances or memories of memories, and, consequently, open up ways of thinking through race, performativity, and social memory? What do the telling and consequent reimagining by a larger public that has not literally witnessed the performance, but has access to parts of it and representations of these representations, make possible?
The form of the Biobox performances emphasizes the critical importance of public address as it demands, even more so than most theatrical performances, that the audience be attentive and hopes that it will be emotionally engaged. Unlike conventional theater, this audience is not permitted the illusion of invisibility as performances are staged for a single audience member at a time, within a small box that the actor wears on her shoulders. The audience member is also given control of a card that tells the actor to switch between English and a second language and, in the Japanese box, is encouraged to pull on strings to unfurl photographs, much like a popup book. The face-to-face interactions of the Bioboxes make the audience member just as visible as the performer and both individuals are made acutely aware of precisely how their bodies inhabit this tiny stage. One critic speaking of her experience as an audience member states: "I was very aware of my face mirroring her face. I was trying to respond to the mood. When she started to cough and things became serious, I stopped smiling because it wasn't smiling time. I was performing as well" (Levin et al. 62). Moreover, although the audience is able to control the performance to a degree by deciding which language the performer will use, these are exercises of power for which the audience is held accountable. In the case of the Japanese Biobox, the audience can compel Mochizuki to switch back and forth between Japanese and English, but the audience must also look into Mochizuki's eyes as it exerts its desire. While perhaps not quite dialogues (or perhaps the oxymoron silent dialogues might be appropriate here), these performances constitute moments of physical and emotional exchange between the actor and audience. And because they take place in quarters too intimate to permit the division into public and private space, the interactions demand a redrawing, if not absolute erasure given the relations of power, of the line that separates speaker and listener. As Kim Solga astutely notes in a discussion with other Canadian theater critics about Bioboxes, as an audience member watching Bioboxes, "you're hyper-aware of the spectatorial structure shaping your experience, and you're trying to get inside it, and you're having a dialogue with yourself at the same time as you're having a dialogue with the box about the problem" (Levin et al. 67).
Since the Bioboxes are performed in front of one audience member at a time, even though the show toured the country on three occasions (2007, 2009, 2011), only a limited number of people is ever able to see these performances. And despite, or perhaps precisely because of, its insistently local nature, Bioboxes directs attention to how various publics come into being as a range of people encounter it. While the actual performance of the Biobox is quite intimate and idiosyncratic, much like a peep show (an observation that Laura Levin also shares [63]), any kind of a public attached to the Bioboxes is formed through the conversations that audience members have, either with each other or with those who have not seen the performance. At the same time, the Japanese Biobox reveals much about the terms of public address and orientation as well as the shared worldviews and common feelings that create social intimacies and are assumed to be at work in publics. The particular moment of public dialogue is key for understanding how utterances resonate for different audiences. Mochizuki has commented on some of the various ways that stagings of her Biobox performance have been read, noting, for instance, that some audience members have been moved to feelings of compassion for Hiroshima and, after March 2011, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, even though her piece does not make overt reference to either of these events (Mochizuki, "Discussion of Arts of Conscience"). The range of meanings generated through these performances is suggestive for thinking about how certain representations of Japan, and by extension Asia, resonate in more and less intimate ways depending on the circumstances of their stagings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Minor Intimacies of Race by Christine Kim. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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