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Articles

Volume 32, Number 1 (2007)

Dislocations and Diaspora: Reading Evelyn Lau’s Choose Me

Submitted
March 26, 2008
Published
2007-01-01

Abstract

Evelyn Lau’s fiction asks for an understanding of diasporic community that does not take race or religion as unproblematic markers of belonging. Lau demands that histories of dislocation be understood not as singular traumatic events, but as a series of multiple dislocations that haunt the present, producing what Homi Bhabha calls an “unhomed” state. Lau’s short-story collection Choose Me leads to a view of diasporic experience as a condition of subjectivity and not as an object of analysis, encouraging instead a focus on contingency and genealogy. As Charlotte Sturgess argues, the absence of markedly racialized characters in Choose Me does not preclude the presence of ethnos. It emerges precisely in the difficulty of locating a coherent site from which to speak. The gaze of female characters like Belinda in “Suburbia,” and the narrator’s satiric penetration throughout Choose Me, serve to exoticize and undermine white patriarchal society