| This thesis centers not so much around the supposedly exotic Otherness of "the Chinese in Cuba" as on the ways in which a diasporic (displaced) notion of Chineseness is celebrated, accepted, negotiated, modified, silenced, or rejected. That is, how it is construed and represented by Cubans, Chinese, and "mixed" Chinese Cubans on the island. It takes as its points of departure two conceptual premises. First, at least since Jose Marti's complete erasure of the Chinese component in Cuban society, Chinese and Chinese Cubans have endured the longest silence in and outside Cuba and are not new to changing politics of (mis)recognition and (mis)representation.The second point rests with the recent revival of Chinese ethnicity in Cuba which is based both on a number of Euro-American Orientalist assumptions of a distinctive and essential Chineseness and on the "Oriental" use of Orientalist discourse, which perfectly illustrates the "indigenous" employment of what I want to call strategic Orientalism. While the former is being promoted, somewhat ambiguously, by the Cuban state and its intelligentsia, the latter is articulated by first and second generation Chinese Cubans. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
