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

Performative subjectivity and diasporic identity
Based on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist approach and the speech act theory of 
J. L. Austin and John Searle, Judith Butler further developed the theory of performa-
tivity by broadening its scope beyond speech acts to include the actions of physical 
bodies. According to Butler (
2011
, p. xii), “performativity must be understood not 
as a singular or deliberate ‘act’, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice 
by which discourse produces the effects that it names.” As a process of subject for-
mation, performativity creates what it describes through repetitive social practices, 
such as speech acts and behavioural gestures, which are an individual’s attempt to 
articulate his or her belonging to a social identity category. Butler (
1999
, p. 181) 
believes that “there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is vari-
ably constructed in and through the deed.” Both the doer and the deed are discursive 
constructions subject to the “reiterative power of discourse” (Butler, 
2011
, p. xii). 
The doer is constructed performatively through the reiteration of the norms imposed 
by the dominant discourse. In other words, the subject, interpellated into the domi-
nant social order according to the norms in a given society, is compelled to cite and 
mime those norms for its existence to be acknowledged and understood. In the citing 
and repeating of existing norms, the possibility always exists of mockery and sub-
version, since the norms circulating in society, rather than being monolithic entities, 
are often conflicting, incompatible and divergent, and “the force of the regulatory 
law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the 
hegemonic force of that very regulatory law” (Butler, 
2011
, p. xii).
Identity formation, as an aspect of subjectivity, is also performative. Butler (
1999
, 
p. 33) asserts that “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ 
that are said to be its results.” As an ongoing cultural construction and a continuous 
process proceeding through repetitive performative acts, identity is shaped by the 
sociohistorical context and rhetoric of human discourse; thus it is subject to con-
stant changes and transformations. A social actor can be understood only by locating 
himself or herself within the discursive matrices of identity categories and estab-
lishing his or her place as a social being by repeating the speech acts and symbolic 
behaviours associated with those categories. What one performs at particular times 

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in particular contexts and how one is perceived by others as one’s spectators consti-
tute one’s identity. Therefore, identity does not express some authentic or essential 
inner self but is the dramatic effect of one’s performances and actions. However, 
performativity should not be conceived as the subject’s freedom to choose or play 
a variety of identities but as both a constitutive operation in identity creation and a 
constraining manifestation of dominant norms.
Butler’s performative theory is particularly useful for understanding the sub-
ject and identity formation in a diasporic context, which is “a site of tension where 
two different cultures (home and host) collide to create new forms of subjectivi-
ties” (Nziba Pindi, 
2018
, p. 28). If we follow Ann Swidler’s notion of culture as “a 
‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views” (Swidler, 
1986
, p. 273) from 
which one selects available resources to express and assert one’s identity, we can 
clearly see that the tool kit of the diaspora is rather abundant and hybrid with two 
or more ‘regulatory laws’. The diasporic experience of performing identity between 
two or more worlds is a hybrid one where cultural hybridity serves as “a critical dis-
course committed to the practice of empowering minorities by envisioning forms of 
agency” (Bhabha, 
2015
, p. xi) that celebrates new ways of doing and being. Hybrid-
ity is thus a powerful tool for diasporic people who wish to perform new subjec-
tivities in specific cultural contexts and a liminal space of identity performance that 
breaks normative patterns of behaviours and celebrates difference as uniqueness. 
The performative subjectivity and identity in diasporic conditions, being hybrid and 
interstitial, is far more dynamic, unstable, multifaceted and subversive than it is in 
other situations, as “diasporic groups dynamically reconstitute their understandings 
of cultural tradition, authenticity, and identity in line with their diasporic contexts 
and experiences” (Halualani, 
2008
, p. 4).
Reading the novel 
The Last Ship
from Butler’s performative perspective, this 
article studies the main characters’ linguistic performativity, exemplified in naming 
and family storytelling, and corporeal performativity, manifested in eating behav-
iours, against the hybrid cultural background that characterises the Caribbean space. 
The novel presents Chinese-Caribbean people’s performative construction of their 
diasporic identity. In doing so, it not only challenges the essentialised notion of Chi-
nese immigrants’ experiences as homogenous and unified but also promotes a third 
space of difference that subverts the binary concepts of assimilation and rejection.