Keywords
China men
history
center
margin
recentering
Chinese American immigrants
power
map
whiteness
How to Cite
Abstract
In China men (1980) Kingston undermines the long-persisting myth of white Americans as sole founders and pioneers of the United States of America. The ethos of a white Anglo-Saxon man as a sole originating and sustaining force behind the creation and development of the country is one more manifestation of white exclusivity and its propensity towards exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities. By illuminating the significant contributions of her Chinese American ancestors to the building of the nation, Kingston reconstructs the official version of American history and recenters her Chinese immigrant forebears from the margins to the center. Still, any recentralization carries its own pitfalls, entailing the danger of replicating some of the dominant structures of power that one tries to undermine. I look at Kingston’s undermining of the white centered American historical narrative and her recentering of Chinese American immigrants through the prism of space studies, politics of location, politics of translation, whiteness studies and broader multiethnic studies. I also place the discussion of the recentering of Chinese Americans in Kingston’s China Men in the discourse of margin-center metaphor, shedding light on potential pitfalls of recentering, pitfalls which Kingston mostly manages to avoid.
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