The Rhetoric of Double Allegiance: Imagined Communities in North American Diasporic Chinese Literatures

The most popular works of Chinese North American literature can be read as structurally centered upon a logic of the “neither/nor”: texts exemplified by the work of Amy Tan that display allegiance to neither America (the “hostland”) nor to China (the “homeland”). Rather than a doubling of allegiance, through a positive rhetoric of “both/and” national belonging, texts within this canon display a double negative. This logic betrays the residual power of racialized nationalism, in the contexts of hyphenated identities and diasporic community formation. In contrast to the pernicious influence of this nationalistic “neither here nor there” rhetoric, the work of writers like Fred Wah and Larissa Lai engage a local-global dynamism through a “both/and” paradigm for diasporic identity. These writers explore, complicate, and critique in productive ways the rhetorical dynamics of Orientalism/Occidentalism that are shaped in the transnational context of shifting Sino-American relations