Reimagining "Tense and Tender Ties" in García's Monkey Hunting

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 14 (2013) Issue 5 Article 12 Reimagining "Tense and Tender Ties" in García's Monkey Hunting Yu-Fang Cho Miami University of Ohio Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Recommended Citation Cho, Yu-Fang. "Reimagining "Tense and Tender Ties" in García's Monkey Hunting." 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This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Volume 14 Issue 5 (December 2012) Article 12 Yu-Fang Cho, "Reimagining Tense and Tender Ties in García's Monkey Hunting" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/12> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012) Special issue New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals Ed. I-Chun Wang <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/> Abstract: In her article "Reimagining Tense and Tender Ties in Garcia's Monkey Hunting" Yu-Fang Cho analyses Cristina García's re-narration of transnational histories of the multi-racial, multigenerational Chinese Cuban family in Monkey Hunting (2003) Drawing on recent scholarship on comparative racialization including Ann Laura Stoler's formulation of "tense and tender ties" as a method, Cho examines how García's family saga unsettles the temporal and spatial logics of EuroAmerican modernity through the deployment of cyclical narrative structure that spatially maps emerging or even unintelligible connections between disparate life stories. Reading Monkey Hunting as a piece of imaginative critical historiography, Cho argues that it is through creative reconceptualization of the structure of history and social relations that García's narrative puts forward towards a radical vision of imaginary and epistemological emancipation. Yu-Fang Cho, "Reimagining Tense and Tender Ties in Garcia's Monkey Hunting" page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/12> Special issue New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals. Ed. I-Chun Wang Yu-Fang CHO Reimagining Tense and Tender Ties in García's Monkey Hunting Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century indentured labor migration from China to Cuba, acclaimed Cuban American writer Cristina García's Monkey Hunting (2003) narrates cross-cultural encounters and multi-racial identity formations that emerged from this largely forgotten history, which scholars have recently begun to excavate (Hu-Dehart; Hu-Dehart and López; Lai and Tan; Sui; Yun). García's imaginative re-narration spans from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, staging "a 120-year dialogue between Cuba and Asia" (259) that unfolds in the shadows of historic events which transpired in China, Cuba, the United States, and Vietnam: from the aftermath of the Opium War, the introduction of indentured labor from China in Cuba upon the demise of the African slave trade, Cuba's struggle against Spain for independence, World War II, the Cuban Revolution, the Cultural Revolution to the Vietnam War. While contemporary ethnic US-American (im)migration narratives are often framed as individual struggles with cultural conflicts between two generations, Monkey Hunting is structured as a family saga with vignettes from five generations on three continents. As such, this mini-epic recasts the familiar individual, developmental immigrant narratives as part of the emerging cultural archives of global migrations between Asia and the Americas dating back to the nineteenth century. As a prominent example of recent creative expressions which unsettle the long-st (...truncated)