Sigrid Nunez’s minority cosmopolitanism and the ethics of interest

Abstract

In 1996, the Association for Asian American Studies embraced an unknown mixed-race author named Sigrid Nunez as a promising new voice, awarding her the literature prize at the annual conference in Washington, D.C. The book that brought Nunez this distinction was A Feather on the breath of God, a fictionalized memoir whose first two sections focused on the narrator’s Chinese Panamanian father and German mother respectively. But Asian Americanists soon lost interest in Nunez because henceforth she wrote about unraced or white narrators and protagonists, and she sought inspirations far beyond Asian America. This paper examines two recent novels by Nunez, The friend (2018) and What are you going through (2020), within the framework of the transnational turn in American Studies. Arguably, Nunez’s prose may be productively read through Susan Koshy’s (2011) notion of “minority cosmopolitanism” because it converses with a cosmopolitan imagined community and interpellates anguished strangers into a “public”, as defined by Michael Warner (2005). Like much of her earlier work, these two novels are meditations on the nature of interest: Can it be an ethical response to the anguished other? What exactly does it do? What triggers, holds, and extinguishes it? Is it a limited resource that must be dispensed cautiously? Who deserves it and who does not? How does interest help to sustain both its subject and object?