Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works"

Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works" Giselle Liza Anatol (bio) and Joo Ok Kim (bio) Although African/Jamaican novelist Patricia Powell and Chinese/ Canadian writer Sui Sin Far were born almost exactly a century apart, their artistic works are strongly linked by setting—both time and place—and the authors' forceful critiques of the British Empire and its productions of colonial knowledge.1 For Far, the empire entangled transnational links from Shanghai, where Far's English father met her Chinese mother; to England and the British dominion of Canada, where she spent her childhood; to her work as a journalist in the United States—founded as a British colony—to Jamaica, another British colony, which Canada provided with "an ongoing force of women office workers" (White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, 32). Her writings, particularly "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian" (1909) and "The Sugar-Cane Baby" (1910), provide sharp expositions on the racialized, gendering plantation labor system and white supremacist colonial violence routed through the circuits of empire. Patricia Powell's novel The Pagoda (1999), which features a gender-queer Chinese/ Jamaican protagonist seeking firm footing in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica, holds significance in the historiography of the Chinese Americas and multiple global souths—including the U.S. South—which invites exploration beyond the book's conventional categorization as queer fiction of the Anglophone Caribbean. Thinking through the Chinese/Jamaican community as represented in Powell's novel in conjunction with Sui Sin Far's stories set in Jamaica, we explore the ways [End Page 121] both authors challenge xenophobic and imperialist regimes, particularly those predicated on knowledge production and literacy. Far's decision to "fight… battles" on behalf of Chinese people in North America by writing articles in local papers ("Leaves" 223) and Powell's artistic choice to open and close her narrative with the act of letter-writing foreground the ways that composing and deciphering all kinds of texts contribute to empire building and whether, as Audre Lorde so provocatively questioned, these "master's" tools can indeed "destroy the master's house." Like Ella Shohat, we argue for the Caribbean's significance in understanding Orientalism: the myth of Columbus's "discovery" of the so-called "New World" in 1492 can be tied to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in Spain in the same year—commonly known as the Reconquista. The events are linked in terms of both discourses of travel and conquest and expurgatory practices. As Shohat claims, Perhaps the first modern orientalist was none other than Columbus. After his arrival in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, he wrote to the Spanish throne praising the war against both Muslims and Jews, and thanking the queen for having sent him to the regions of India to convert its people to the holy faith. Here, discourses about Muslims, Jews, and (Asian) Indians crossed the Atlantic… arming the conquistadors with a ready-made us-versus-them ideology aimed at the regions of India, but applied instead towards the indigenous peoples of the accidentally discovered continent. (47) Significantly, Shohat's argument hinges on acts of writing: Columbus's missive to the queen; his travel journals, diaries, and maps; Bibles for converting "heathens"; and later, historical accounts of empire and colonization are essential to constructions of race, geographies of the "backward" cultures of the Global South, idealized notions of the "progress" of the Global North. In U.S. history, denied or restricted access to literacy was essential—even after the abolition of slavery—to preventing Black, Indigenous, and other people of color from participating in the political sphere. Twentieth-century literacy tests, for example, served as obstacles to citizenship: barriers to African American enfranchisement and, in the form of entrance applications, impediments to Chinese immigrants' physical entry to the nation. Despite its centrality to the liberation narratives of prominent figures, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and others, literacy has been utilized for "regulation, imposition, surveillance," and other means of control that regularly "do damage or inflict harm on individuals" (Pritchard 9, Prologue). These considerations of reading, writing, and power...

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