Echoes from the borderlands: Transnation and cultural identity in Chuang Hua's Crossings

Transnational migration and Diaspora have been seen as the moving force that fractures the parameters of nation and identity. Recent critiques of Diaspora discourses started, however, to call into question the oxymoronic relationship between the two. This article, through its endeavour to map out the complex psychic landscape of the Chinese American migr protagonist in the Chinese-born American writer Chuang Hua's novel Crossings, first published in 1968, captures a glimpse of the dynamic double act of transnational mobility. That is, the act of going global towards transnationalism implicates the simultaneous act of going local towards both an embedded hybridity and a cultural locality of an imagined homeplace that double back on the migration routes. Meanwhile, the dissolution of the primordial subject entails the uncanny return of the schizophrenic migrant subject of the borderlands. While the narrative of the cosmopolitan migr's existence reflects a universal theme of a bi-racial and bi-cultural fragmented self in search of cultural anchorage that transcends national boundaries, this article illustrates how the myriad crossings, geographical and psychic, spatial and temporal, as undertaken by the Chinese American protagonist Fourth Jane, simultaneously de- and re-territorializes the boundaries between nation and transnation, cosmopolitanism and locality as well as the self and the Other. As such, the global and local, transnation and cultural identity are re-viewed here as double-gestured and mutually constitutive rather than exclusive.