Reorientations : a critical study of Chineseness in New Zealand literature

Abstract

This thesis examines how representations of Chineseness in New Zealand literature have changed over time. I provide close readings of selected texts from a wide range of genres within a timeframe that spans the late nineteenth-century to the twenty-first century. Using Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic nature of an utterance, I argue that the term and category 'Chinese' acquires new semantic possibilities each time it is invoked. Bakhtin's proposal that the meanings of a word are equally conditioned by the producer and the addressee (Dialogic Imagination 282) provides the basis for my contention that Chineseness is an open-ended signifier that is deployed for a variety of reasons and which may be received in myriad ways. My thesis departs from a number of studies of Western representations of Chineseness, which suggest that such representations continue to be governed by a set of enduring discursive templates. I also offer a novel approach in juxtaposing the works of Chinese and non-Chinese writers in each chapter, arguing that a segregation of the former negates their role as active participants in ongoing dialogic exchanges about Chineseness. Literature, in its very act of portraying, illuminates the multifaceted nature and unstable properties of the signifier of Chineseness. Its reflection upon the use of concepts of Chineseness at different historical moments not only offers an opportunity for a richer understanding of racial attitudes in the past, but provides a means of interrogating the certainties of received historical accounts of Chinese settlement in New Zealand. My investigation of New Zealand literary representations of Chineseness traces its discursive shifts in terms of the following themes: displacement, sexual predation, peculiar bodies, incomprehensibility, and 'China'. The multiple discursive trajectories that I uncover break with a prevailing trend in Chinese-New Zealand historiography that frames Chinese settlement in New Zealand as a linear progression in which the Chinese are transformed from reviled outsiders to tolerated citizens. As such, this thesis extends but also provides a platform for reevaluating critical writing on Chinese-New Zealand history.