Serena Fusco, <i>Incorporation of Chineseness. Hybridity, Bodies and Chinese American Literature</i>
10.13125/2039-6597/2959
As Serena Fusco highlights in her latest publication, “incorporation” has at least a twofold interpretation. On the one hand, it denotes the process of becoming part of a larger whole (albeit not necessarily through conformity). On the other, it evokes the body, a corporeal matter, a visible, physical shape. The Chineseness of the title is located by the author at the intersection of these two meanings, whereby it becomes recognizable precisely at the moment of its incorporation into something else.
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2039-6597
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Vincenzo Bavaro
Between
Serena Fusco, <i>Incorporation of Chineseness. Hybridity, Bodies and Chinese American Literature</i>
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
7
Between the Texts/Reviews: Eds. G. Iacoli, M. Guglielmi, C. Cao
2017-05-31
2017-06-20
2017-06-02
2017-06-20
1
Vincenzo Bavaro
2017/05/31
10.13125/2039-6597/2959
2039-6597
13
Serena Fusco, <i>Incorporation of Chineseness. Hybridity, Bodies and Chinese American Literature</i>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/2959/2509
7
                 Serena Fusco
          Incorporations of Chineseness.
                Hybridity, Bodies,
         and Chinese American Literature
       Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Cambridge Scholars
                 Publishing, 2016, 270 pp.
      As Serena Fusco highlights in her latest publication,
“incorporation” has at least a twofold interpretation. On the one hand,
it denotes the process of becoming part of a larger whole (albeit not
necessarily through conformity). On the other, it evokes the body, a
corporeal matter, a visible, physical shape. The Chineseness of the title is
located by the author at the intersection of these two meanings,
whereby it becomes recognizable precisely at the moment of its
incorporation into something else. In fact, as Fusco writes,
«’incorporation’ is a strategy of subjectivization that makes bodies into
‘living tools’ for absorbing and displaying visible signs of (cultural)
difference at the moment when different cultural narratives, or claims
of allegiance, intersect» (69).
      Incorporations of Chineseness is structured into two main clusters.
“Part I, Field to Text, 1974-2015” first focuses on the rise of the Asian
American Studies field in the mid Seventies, through its heated debates
and controversies in the following decades, to its spectacular
intellectual and academic establishment in the Nineties. Fusco is
interested in providing a fresh understanding of these defining
moments by uncovering the crucial role played by Chinese America
and «Chineseness as a transnational cultural category» (6). The latter
half of this first cluster explores both gender as a crucial analytical



Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)
Serena Fusco, Incorporations of Chineseness (Vincenzo Bavaro)



category in the Asian American critical debate, and the signification of
the Chinese body (and the hybrid body) at the overlap and conflict
between its private dimension and its public value. As Fusco argues, in
the literature she examines «characters experience their bodies as
spaces to negotiate the touch of the world, zones of conflict,
performative tools, spaces where cultural interpellations and choice,
self-articulation and collective accountability, overlap» (71).
      The second part of the book (chapter 3, 4, and 5) is grouped under
the title “Text to Field, 1956-1976.” It performs three acts of close
readings on three novels written in the two decades preceding the
official emergence of the Asian American cultural production, «against
a backdrop of historical traumas and precarious conditions of tension,
including the Cold War» (17). The belated success of all three novels
provides a point of entry in the foundational instability of Asian
American discourse vis à vis its interaction with the category of
“chineseness”, and the changing representational politics of Chinese
American women’s writing.
      Chapter 3 focuses on The Frontiers of Love (1956) by Diana Chang,
the first US-born Chinese American to publish a novel in English, who
recuperated and mobilized a pre-existing tradition of representing
Eurasianness, in a Cold War context. Chapter 4 investigates Crossings
(1968) another English language novel written by the China-born
Chinese American writer Chuang Hua, highlighting in particular its
role in defining fundamental features in the future development of
Asian American literature and ethnic consciousness, namely the
complex relation between Asian and Asian American, a major turning
point in the cultural debate in the late Sixties, and between individual
and community in a woman’s path toward self-expression. Chapter 5
is a study of a Chinese-language novel, Sangqing yu Taohong by Nie
Hualing (1976), translated into English in 1988 as Mulberry and Peach.
Fusco interprets its arguably allegorical evocation of traumatic events
in XX Century Chinese history as «testifying a circular rhetoric that
prompts a reconnection to a certain ‘version’ (in cultural or political
terms) of the homeland in order to be accepted in a new context» (19).



2
                                        Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



      Fusco’s work is a brilliantly rich inter- and multi-disciplinary
contribution to Asian American studies, Chinese studies, and
comparative literature. While departing from the Asian American
discourse and its literary and cultural debates, the author moves away
from the national and linguistic boundaries of the United States
towards a discussion of Asian transnationalism and, in particular,
Chinese diaspora, investigating what writing “China” may mean. «I
attempt to historicize the centripetal pull of the Chinese diaspora and
simultaneously to dig vertically, in historical terms, on the two sides of
the Pacific» (21). In order to succeed in her attempt, Fusco mobilizes an
impressive theoretical and critical bibliography, in both English and in
Chinese.
      In addition to the excellently productive critical move to
contextually scrutinize understudied literary works written in a pivotal
era for Asian Americans, the author here draws on narratology and
feminist theory, philosophy and semiotics, to critique American
neoliberal multiculturalism and to assess the multilayered functions
performed by the body as the ground on which Americanness and
Chineseness converge and may clash.
      Fusco’s unique contribution to the several fields she interpellates
is most visible in her interrogation of the formation of Asia American
literature from a Chinese diasporic perspective. This ex-centric
perspective allows for a distancing and refocusing that ultimately
reveals some unexplored «contradictions that have always been
there—of which the incorporation of China […] is part and parcel» (10).




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Serena Fusco, Incorporations of Chineseness (Vincenzo Bavaro)




                                     The author
Vincenzo Bavaro

      Vincenzo Bavaro is assistant professor of American Literature at
the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” His research interests include
performance theory, ethnic studies, and queer theory.

        Email: vbavaro@unior.it



                                     The review
Date sent: 30/01/2017
Date accepted: 15/04/2017
Date published: 31/05/2017



                          How to quote the review
Bavaro, Vincenzo, “Serena Fusco, Incorporation of Chineseness. Hybridity,
Bodies and Chinese American Literature”, Longing and Belonging / Désir et
Appartenance, Eds. M. Fusillo, B. Le Juez, B. Seligardi, Between, VII.13
(2017), www.betweenjournal.it/




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