The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last Ship

Abstract

Jan Lowe Shinebourne, previously published as Jan Shinebourne, is a Chinese-Caribbean writer born and raised in Guyana. Her first two novels, Timepiece (1986) and The Last English Plantation (1988), focus on the Indian-Guyanese experience. Her third book, a collection of short stories entitled The Godmother and Other Stories (2004), suddenly acknowledges her Chinese heritage, both by using her full name, Jan Lowe Shinebourne, on the cover and by writing about the Chinese-Caribbean experience. Since then, Shinebourne has been foregrounding ‘the Chinese’ in her writing. Her latest novel, The Last Ship, published in 2015, tells the story of three generations of women in a Chinese-Caribbean family. This article explores the diasporic experience and identity-searching journey of these Chinese-Caribbean women from a performative perspective and analyses how the performance of naming, family storytelling, and culinary practices has contributed to the performative feature of the Chinese diaspora’s subject formation. The novel, presenting Chinese-Caribbean people’s performative construction of their diasporic identity, not only challenges the essentialised notion of Chinese immigrants’ experiences as homogenous and unified but also promotes a third space of difference that subverts the binary concepts of assimilation and rejection.