Sean Metzger's The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization offers fresh interpretations of the themes of exilic home and global engagements within the frame of globalization. The striking word “seascape” circulates throughout the book both as a metaphor and methodology. Its function and meaning are multifold. It metaphorically nurtures global China and practically forms a lens to zoom in on Chinese transoceanic migration, economic development, performative representations, artistic productions, and social reproductions of Chineseness in the process and progression of Chinese-inflected globalization.
Sean Metzger's explorative investigation of seascape-oriented culture and power production reminds me of River Elegy (河殇), a groundbreaking TV documentary series produced in mainland China in 1988. The “river” of the title refers to the Yellow River, the second longest river in China and regarded as the origin and center of the agriculture-based Chinese civilization. The TV show posed strong criticism of this civilization and examined how maritime and ocean-based civilizations defeated the crisis-ridden Yellow River civilization in the nineteenth century. It stirred nationwide political and cultural debates among Chinese intellectuals, aroused a longing for the ocean culture in the West, and endorsed Western democracy and individualism. The ocean fever came to an abrupt halt as the Tiananmen Square Incident took place in 1989.
About thirty decades later, Sean Metzger enlivens ocean fever and examines, in turn, how China and Chinese culture have infected the global via the seascape that he defines as a methodology, and how “Chinese and Chineseness are produced contingently in response to locations” (5). As stated in the Prologue, his main goal of the book is to “decenter globalization, shifting to nodal points that highlight Chinese-inflected processes of cultural assertion, capital accumulation, and artistic invention” (5).
The book consists of a Prologue, Introduction, five chapters, and an Epilogue. The Prologue and Introduction offer poetic narrations of the author's cultural experience and explorations of global China, review the historical backdrop against global cultural practices and productions, and state the author's motivation and rationales for his research. In the Introduction, Metzger also outlines the key cases for discussion and major theoretical frameworks utilized to conduct his analyses and arguments in each chapter.
Chapter 1, “Reeling,” presents cultural and cinematic analyses of a number of Chinese documentaries on Chinese migrants in the Atlantic, including Chinee Girl (dir. Natalie Wei, 2011) and The Chiney Shop (dir. Jeanette Kong, 2012), and discusses how cinematic representations visualize Chinese subjects, exotic spectacles, tourist gazes, and diasporic nostalgia; how the Chinese diasporic people reconfigure and reformulate local discourses of and mentalities toward them; and how different geographical rubrics embedded in the seascape are interwoven to form new social and cultural production and global engagements. Metzger uses the word “reeling” to describe the technology and characteristics of the films, which produce a particular logic of assemblage similar to the action of deep-sea fishing. As a conceptual metaphor, he uses it to provide “different phenomenological means of apprehending Chineseness across an antipodal imaginary” (39–40).
Chapter 2, “Incorporating,” examines Chinese Caribbean arts, including murals, prints, paintings, and sculptures that document Chinese migrants’ diasporic experience under the repression and exploitation of capitalism and colonialism. These artistic representations encourage and enhance local cultural productions as a way to localize Chineseness, and “push toward understanding of globalization as a theatrical experience” (138).
Chapter 3, “Flowing,” looks at Chinese migrants’ corporeal experiences from Anglophone islands (Trinidad and Tobago) to the Francophone site of Martinique. In Metzger's generalization, “flowing” refers to the activities or movements that involve human physicality and performance by spreading and promoting not only goods, but also beliefs and ideology. Metzger regards such a flowing pattern as an embodiment of transnational practice that facilitates the creation of Chinese networks. Tai chi emerges in this chapter in the context of conflict, exchange, acceptance, and reformulation in transnational communities that enrich and enlarge Chinese culture and Chinese migrants’ engagement with the local. The Chinese “flow” also serves as a discipline with which the Chinese migrants can “navigate through but also access systems of power” (151) and help sustain functional daily routines in the transnational seascape.
Chapter 4, “Ebbing,” approaches the themes of life and death as depicted in human trafficking under the conditions of globalization. Metzger describes “ebbing” as the theatricality of human trafficking that displays individual migrants who “conceal, impersonate, and pretend” while struggling to evade law enforcement and regulations (166). Metzger thinks informal, illegal, and often out-of-sight streams of labor have produced something that can also be called the Chinese Atlantic. Based on the films Ghosts (dir. Nick Broomfield, 2006) and Ten Thousand Waves (aka Better Life; dir. Isaac Julien, 2010), both about the twenty-three Fujianese migrant workers who drowned near England's coast on February 5, 2004, Metzger urges us to redefine the linguistic connotations of human trafficking to seek possibilities for understanding global human relations beyond the contracts of registered and unregistered human labor in global migration. Metzger argues that human trafficking manifests a “dialectic tension between consent and coercion” that “continues to impel migration” (167).
The title of Chapter 5, “Eddying,” stands for a sort of countercurrent and personifies the spiraling water that shifts orientation. By scrutinizing several African art displays regarding Chineseness in South Africa, Metzger presents a more challenging analysis of Chinese migrants’ newly achieved image of business titans in Africa and their artistic replicas. His analysis reveals a paradoxical situation that Chinese migrants have encountered. On the one hand, they occupy the economic domain in the real world and, on the other hand, they are still haunted by the Dutch colonial legacy in the works of art themselves. The eddying of Chineseness as installed and visualized in artistic productions complicates Atlantic discourses of globalization. The contradictory effect of and resistance to Chineseness in these African artworks reconfigure our cognitive mapping of global networks and propel us to seek alternative modes of reading global China.
The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization contributes thoughtful views for us to ponder and explores the merits of aesthetic, cultural, and social production in lieu of globalization and seascapes. However, reading it may be challenging for students and the general public because many of Metzger's points are, to certain extent, buried in vague language. By all means, though, readers will obtain rewards if they are familiar with the theoretical terms and connotations applied.
