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

Introduction
The history of the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean began in 1806 when a group 
of 192 indentured Chinese labourers was shipped to Trinidad to work on the planta-
tions, an experiment made by white colonisers to find substitutes for black slaves 
*
Ping Su 
[e-mail]
1
School of Foreign Languages, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
2
Research Center for Indian Ocean Island Countries, South China University of Technology, 
Guangzhou, China

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 P. Su 
1 3
who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were faced with frequent 
slave rebellions in the colonies and the growing abolitionist movement in Europe 
(Kaye, 
2005
, pp. 4–15; Lai, 
1998
, pp. 9–23). The Chinese coolie trade peaked in 
the middle of the nineteenth century and a large number of Chinese contract work-
ers went to the Caribbean: 124,813 arrived in Cuba between 1847 and 1874 (Hu-
DeHart, 
2002
, p. 70); 13,539, in British Guiana between 1853 and 1879; 2645, in 
Trinidad between 1853 and 1866; 2643, in Surinam between 1853 and 1874; 1152, 
in Jamaica between 1854 and 1884; and over 1300, in the French West Indies in 
1859 (Lai, 
2006
, p. 9). When the coolie trade was made illegal by the Qing govern-
ment in 1874, the migration of indentured Chinese labourers was replaced by the 
arrival of many voluntary Chinese merchant migrants between the late nineteenth 
century and the 1940s, leading to the Chinese’s being the third major ethnic group 
in the Caribbean after the Africans and East Indians until today. This second wave 
of immigrants, driven away by drastic social upheavals and economic pressures in 
China, were mainly engaged in doing business and mostly settled in Jamaica, Trini-
dad, British Guiana (now Guyana) and Suriname, making Jamaica “the second larg-
est of the Chinese communities in the Caribbean, after Cuba” by the late 1930s (Lai, 
1998
, p. 17). At the same time, the Chinese contract labourers generally moved out 
of agriculture and by the late nineteenth century had transformed themselves into 
retail traders. Because the Chinese labourers and merchants were all from Fujian 
and Guangdong, two provinces in South China rich in commercial practices and cul-
ture, the Chinese were very successful in mercantile operations and by the end of 
the nineteenth century dominated the Caribbean retail industry. The upwards social 
mobility of the Chinese caused much animosity in Caribbean society. White colon-
isers, viewing the Chinese as inferior others qualified only for physical labour and 
lacking moral sensibility, accused the latter of threatening the colonial order and 
plantation economy by spreading the social evils of gambling and opium addiction. 
Meanwhile, the African and Indian majorities regarded the Chinese as belonging 
to the exploiting class due to their newly gained middle-class status and economic 
influence (Lai, 
2005
, pp. 61–74). Despite the anguish and adversity resulting from 
discrimination and hostility, Chinese immigrants still managed to integrate them-
selves into Caribbean communities through converting to Christianity or entering 
marriage or de facto relationships with local African or Indian women. This situ-
ation occurred mainly because fewer Chinese females than males migrated to the 
Caribbean (Lai, 
2005
, p. 63). Therefore, the presence of the Chinese in this region 
cannot be overlooked, which is reflected in its literary works.
In Caribbean literature, Chinese people have been constantly visible but only as 
minor characters portrayed in a negative and stereotyped way, often as shrewd and 
bloodsucking male shopkeepers lacking morality and linguistic competence (Lee-
Loy, 
2010
, pp. 43–72). This stereotype first appeared in the novel