Performing Identity in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land

In this essay, I first examine the new mode of subjectivity in the postmodern-global-capitalist era through illustrating the way characters in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land engage in the free play of identity performance. Next I argue that their identity as a set of performances is only possible against the terrain of the Capital. In addition, the performers in the novel try to disavow class antagonism in their performance of identity of differences. The disavowal of class, however, suggests both that class secretly overdetermines other differences in political identity and that class antagonism still predominates over others in the struggle for hegemony. My final discussion, focusing on the final scene of Mona in the Promised Land, explores its political strategy as a mode of resistance and subversion. Today's postmodern-global-capitalist regime favors a new mode of subjectivity, one characterized by an accusation of essentialist fixation and a demise of totalizing identification. The new politics of subjectivity celebrates multiple shifting identifications and free choice to identify with a proliferation of differences. The postmodern subject experiences him- or herself as an agent caught in a contingent particular context but incessantly involved in an activity of hybrid identities without constraint. Interestingly, as one asserts one's fluid identities and shifting identifications, one at the same time promotes one's particular difference(s) to indicate one's proper place within this given field. While liberating diversification is thriving and more differences are produced in late-capitalist society, one is increasingly preoccupied with differences of gender, race, culture, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and sexual orientation--various particulars and diverse lifestyles. Identity becomes performatively enacted and open to endless play of substitution: one performs and moves freely between difference(s). Yet, with no firm predetermined difference(s), one also experiences oneself as radically unsure since all identifications or performances may be reenacted. In the background of late-capitalist globalization that produces and promotes difference(s), our free choice incessantly to perform particular difference(s) aims for recognition. In fact, our demands for recognition have always already been assumed by the nexus of postmodernism, global capitalism, and multiculturalism. A multicultural society especially appeals to our demands: endlessly divided subgroups coexist, no one is excluded, all differences are tolerated, and we are all (mis)recognized. While recognition and tolerance of multiplication of differences ground multiculturalism's politics of identity, it is assumed that all differences are equal and each carries the same weight. Inasmuch as none of the differences is privileged, class difference becomes at best one species of proliferation of new political subjectivities. Once promoted in the Marxist tradition as the determinant of social reality and human subjectivity, the politics of class difference has been referred to as essentialism, and the charge is made that class struggle can no longer overdetermine the complexity of the social reality and multiplicity of subjectivity. Today, the politics of class difference has become less fashionable and progressively decentred by an increasing preoccupation with gender, race, ethnicity, [and] sexuality. (1) Even class consciousness is denied because to draw clear class distinctions becomes impossible or impracticable in today's so-called classless society in which we are all middle class or working class. Though there is a long tradition of confronting issues of class and race in Asian-American literature, Asian-American literary works shift toward investigating the possibility of a fluid, decentered identity in a postmodern era, challenging the very notion of a stable identity of sexuality, gender, and ethnicity. Even in the Asian-American critical field, new tendencies can also be observed: the lessening of cultural nationalism, the increasing feminist and deconstructivist mode, and the embrace of a postmodern subjectivity opened up to multiplicity and free play. …

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