The Chinese Atlantic

Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization

Sean Metzger

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253047540
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to shape—both physically and culturally—the new spaces in which they found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to produce a new way of framing the global.

1

REELING

THE CHINESE ATLANTIC IS A CONCEPTUAL INTERVENTION TO think differently about the geographic rubrics that have organized ideas about oceanic spaces and capitalism, specifically in relation to cultural and social reproduction. This assertion implies the existence of empirical connections between China and Atlantic spaces, but here, the Chinese Atlantic functions principally to complicate or deconstruct other paradigms of Atlantic discourse, such as the green Atlantic, the red Atlantic and, most prominently, the black Atlantic.¹ This chapter engages in this task by looking at artistic productions that ostensibly discuss actual circulations of Chinese migrants in the Atlantic and, more specifically, the Caribbean world. Narratives invested in the quest for evidence across media platforms, the documentary films discussed in the following pages promise to bring previously submerged stories concerning Chinese people and things to the surface.

CHINESE CARIBBEAN DOCUMENTARY AS A MODE OF CHINESE ATLANTIC VISUALITY

Each of my examples identifies and visualizes Chinese subjects, so this chapter discusses the strategies of primarily cinematic representation (although later chapters will complicate the equation of visuality and human subjects). I analyze various kinds of testimony and visual verification organized to establish such a Chinese presence. I also ask, what sorts of narratives emerge in relation to material documentation, and what do such constructions tell us about globalization today?

In addition to narrative and visual evidence connecting purportedly real depictions or testimonies of Chinese experiences in the Caribbean with discourses of globalization, the chapter builds an archive of distinct cinematic seascapes. These seascapes frequently assist the viewer in locating the geographic coordinates that contextualize the narratives, but each film constructs and uses seascapes somewhat differently. A focus on seascapes provides a means to frame understanding of the films, and each cinematic work also shifts slightly how the seascape might be understood, particularly as it frames the “reality” into which the documentary purportedly provides insight. Insofar as each film unsettles truth claims in reference to actual people and places, the documentaries construct realisms in manners that can productively be read as theatrical. Films that exhibit facts and talking-head interviews as access to a relatively unmediated past, I term Chinese Caribbean domestic ethnography. Those instances where the films highlight and question perspectives narrating the past, turning also to visceral sensations produced through film, I call Chinese Caribbean synaesthetic documentaries. Subdividing the already niche genre of Chinese Caribbean documentary illustrates how the use of the seascape varies when deployed in contexts that offer contrasting perspectives on processes of documenting or representing the real.

Documentary film and on-location shooting have long promised an archive of visual knowledge that reflects the particularities of any given place. The camera differs from the painted seascape in its frequently presumed ability to index (in a semiotic sense) an empirical reality, notwithstanding the interventions and subjective desires of the director and crew. The index—in this case, the photographic trace of what existed in front of the camera—is, for my purposes, distinct from the painterly seascapist’s impression and depiction of reality, which became highly conventional from the Dutch Golden Age forward. As Roger B. Stein wrote in Seascape and the American Imagination, a seascape is “as much a record of our thoughts and feelings about that outer fluid space and our attempts to map it and to impose upon it a conceptual grid as it is a documentary record of that space itself.”² Put otherwise, seascapes depict unknown spaces as much as known ones. In this regard, the seascape in documentary might destabilize as much as establish the sense of place constructed through the film.

In relation to the tropical Atlantic, such visualizations have frequently highlighted exotic spectacles: beaches, palm trees, smiling islanders engaged in premodern practices. Such codification emerged forcefully as the Caribbean in particular shifted from an economy based on primitive accumulation (colonies providing raw materials through the plantation system to European metropoles) to one of tourism. This touristic gaze coincided with efforts to clean up beaches, build hotels, and render local cultures digestible; it has been cogently critiqued in the works of Atlantic and Caribbean studies scholars such as Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Patricia Mohammed, Leah Rosenberg, Mimi Sheller, and Krista Thompson. As a way of seeing, tourist imagery generates complex contradictions within and responses to such patterned processes of picturing and in attempts to mitigate or counter them. The clichés of the tropics, rendered through cinematic and literary seascapes, also occasionally animate discourses of diasporic nostalgia, where they may ground familial narratives or serve as devices to recontextualize the lived experiences of subjects inhabiting the region. Within such frameworks, I consider several documentaries that not only feature but also construct Chinese populations and notions of Chineseness in the Caribbean.

The selected films, therefore, constitute an archive documenting but also iterating and even inventing ostensibly Chinese cultural formations as they circulate through the Caribbean. Practical as well as conceptual concerns guide inclusion in this archive. In terms of the former issue, I have gathered films concerning this topic for several years and have talked to many of the artists about their work. My efforts in this regard provide a body of work to view or teach. Approximately a dozen examples of Chinese Caribbean documentaries exist; however, production of such work has boomed over approximately the last decade, so this number will likely increase. Such proliferation overlaps with several factors, including a decrease in the cost of film technologies and the ascendance of networks of Chinese capital that might help to fund such projects. In this chapter, I include discussion of those documentary films that have distribution channels that the interested English-speaking viewer can access.

In building this archive, I have also moved across geographical, linguistic, and ethnic/racial boundaries, because such destabilization occurs in the films themselves when considered as a group. Although Caribbean studies frequently organizes knowledge production in relation to language, imperial histories, or transitions within the region as a whole, the documentaries focusing on Chinese diasporic people deconstruct some of the assumptions frequently embedded in Caribbean and Atlantic discourses. The films highlight often occluded narratives in the dominant (and certainly productive) focus on a black Atlantic by demonstrating some of the ways in which such a formation is entangled with specific Asiatic racial formations and larger currents of cultural exchange. These cinematic productions shift focus from commonly evoked nodal points in triangular structures that reveal transnational links, usually among Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

The films thus implicitly propose new geometries that speak to Chinese Caribbean migrations as a subset of Chinese Atlantic seascapes. In so doing, the documentaries underscore the partiality of a black Atlantic vision or paradigm. My focus on several documentaries brings into view some surprising similarities among various locations, in addition to glaring differences among them. Chinese migrations have long occurred in the isles of interest to me. Nevertheless, in and of themselves, most of these islands tend not to register as particularly meaningful in popular discourses of globalization, given their small sizes and degrees of influence in the world, even though the Caribbean region as a whole is frequently described as the cradle of global capitalism because of the transnational slave trade and plantation system. However, when taken together, these selected sites suggest how contemporary Chinese investments of capital might reframe historical commercial and cultural circulations. Overall, this chapter reveals the ways in which Chinese Caribbean documentary archives seascapes that telescope between past and present, most often by drawing out narratives of generational migration. As perhaps the cultural medium of globalization par excellence (Hollywood imports, after all, eclipse nearly all national film production in countries outside the United States), film offers a set of visual technologies and conventions for (ostensibly) apprehending Chinese Caribbean populations reconfigured by domestic scenes to address, identify, and shape a specific locality.

REELING

I focus on the genre of documentary film because it traffics in and depends for its definition on signs of the real and the authentic. Rather than an ontological consideration of who or what is actually Chinese, the various works provoke consideration of how one comes to understand this label and what investments render this term meaningful in relation to the people and locations that the documentaries illuminate. Because film functions primarily through the use of optical and acoustic signs that generate epiphenomena, including affective and haptic sensations that form through surface encounters with projection screens, these works also point us to aesthetics that matter. In other words, they direct attention to the ways in which certain kinds of artistic devices reveal and produce material effects that facilitate spectators’ cognizance of the Chinese Atlantic as both fantasy and, to a degree, materiality.

Reeling is the term I use to describe many of the characteristics of the films as a group. This word recalls the action of deep-sea fishing, which involves extensive amounts of line to catch anything beneath the surface. As a conceptual metaphor, I use it to suggest a search for apparent truth, because documentaries hinge on this sort of investigation of the real and suggest an in-depth engagement with their respective subjects. Reeling evokes a process, and even if the literal procedure of bringing in a fish from the sea depends on certain facts (speed of the boat, strength of the line, power of the fish), it also depends a bit on hope and educated guesswork. Although I elaborate these qualities in the pages that follow, I want to mark from the outset the resonance of this concept with the medium of film itself, in spite of the fact that celluloid has yielded to the digital. The film reel suggests a piece of a larger story or of a historical narrative. Although that technology became standardized in the industry, the possibility for changes in order, for reels to go missing, for incineration, and so on suggest how narratives about the past might be easily altered. In part, then, I turn to reeling to gesture toward the desires implicated in the documentary form: a pursuit of some sign of the real that is always a contingent and unfinished exercise.

The attention to signs moves alongside Anne-Marie Lee-Loy’s study of the enunciation of Chinese Caribbean texts through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on minor literature. For Deleuze and Guattari, the deterritorialization of language, political contextualization, and collective value set conditions for literary expression by minorities working within the shadow of a tradition of “great literature” (their example is Franz Kafka, a Jewish, Czech-born writer who published in German).³ Lee-Loy has herself written a survey of depictions of Chinese characters in Anglophone Caribbean literature. Pace these writers, I move through but also below and beyond nationalisms to articulate how Chineseness emerges through a particular set of films that suggests how Chineseness is constructed and might matter across antipodal, archipelagic, and insular imaginaries. The sensorial dimensions at work in this constellation guide viewers to ruminate on certain claims about ostensible empirical realities such as Chinese families (a subject common to many of the films, given the chain migrations that often fuel diasporic communities).

My inquiry through but also outside the frame of the national recognizes several factors that affect the ways in which people imagine Chineseness. China’s soft power is being experienced across the globe, but, given the relative size and wealth of many countries in the Atlantic, a new sense of Chineseness is being felt acutely. As one example, China’s Han Ban (also known as the Office of Chinese Language Council International) has rapidly set up Confucius Institutes in Cuba (2009), Jamaica (2010), the Bahamas (2012), Trinidad and Tobago (2013), Barbados (2015), Grenada (2015), Antigua and Barbuda (2018), and the Dominican Republic (2018). Although charged with language training, most of these institutions also offer cultural classes and programs. This kind of educational diplomacy pairs with financial circulations of Chinese capital, particularly on certain Caribbean islands, where such investment has been occurring on an unprecedented scale. Of course, here onlookers must note that the amounts invested, when viewed from individual islands, may seem vast, but in relation to China’s overall international investment portfolio, only a small sum has been moved into a particular geographic area.⁴ Nevertheless, China has invested billions of dollars in major infrastructural projects and loans to insular sites. One of the largest of these, for the moment, is the “Beijing Highway” that cuts across northern and southern Jamaica. Other ventures include new stadiums and performing arts complexes in various island locations. These massive undertakings indicate rapid physical transformations throughout archipelagos, transformations that owe much to China’s current position in the global economy.

Another reason to think through imaginings of China and Chineseness across sites is connected to streams of historical migration. Significant numbers of Chinese migrants have lived in the Atlantic spaces under consideration since the nineteenth century, and their continued presence has generated a substantial amount of artistic production about and by Chinese subjects. This aesthetic history is, like all histories in the Atlantic, manifold, since the material conditions wrought through European and later American empires have played a significant role in how the term Chinese has come to matter in any particular place. To speak of, for example, the Chinese Caribbean or a Chinese Canadian can simplify what are complex negotiations of identification and political/economic power that occur at various scales, from the individual person to an insular community to the national to the regional to even larger transnational frameworks that link Asia to the Americas and beyond. The current social production of Chineseness depends in part on what sorts of historical contexts inform an understanding of Chinese in a given context.

My admittedly unusual assemblage of Chinese Caribbean documentaries—including material shot in Havana, Kingston, New York, Port of Spain, Toronto, and elsewhere—does not neatly correspond to area or ethnic studies rubrics, save for the fact that they all involve some element of realism in representing Chinese migrants. The gambit of amassing an argument in this manner is to think through but also to extend existing paradigms of knowledge, including the seascapes that I offer in this book. The nearly dozen works I examine in this chapter demonstrate how a focus on seascapes might be productive and, to a lesser degree, what my framework might miss. The films could be usefully regrouped into other analytic frame...