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

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Vol.:(0123456789)
Neohelicon
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-022-00641-1
1 3
The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative 
subjectivity in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s 
The Last Ship
Ping Su
1,2
 
Accepted: 27 April 2022 
© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2022
Abstract
Jan Lowe Shinebourne, previously published as Jan Shinebourne, is a Chinese-Car-
ibbean 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 nam-
ing, 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 homog-
enous and unified but also promotes a third space of difference that subverts the 
binary concepts of assimilation and rejection.
Keywords
Chinese-Caribbean · Performativity · Diasporic identity · Hybridity