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

Performativity of naming
Butler (
2011
, p. xvii), in discussing the performative potential of names, asserts that 
“the naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of 
a norm.” She observes that the name has the power “to secure the identity of the sub-
ject over time” and “to confer durability and recognizability on that which it names” 
(Butler, 
2011
, p. 109–110). To call one by a name is to delineate one’s space and to 
construct one’s “social positionality” (Butler, 
1997
, p. 33). Therefore, as a form of 
interpellation, naming “is not descriptive, but inaugurative,” which means that “it 
seeks to introduce a reality rather than report on an existing one” and “accomplishes 
this introduction through a citation of existing convention” (Butler, 
1997
, p. 33). For 

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The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity…
Butler, there is no “addressee prior to the address,” and “the act of naming brings 
the subject into being” (Salih, 
2002
, p. 129). In other words, the subject and identity 
do not preexist the name but are constructed by it.
Chinese-Caribbean immigrants, who were forced to “stop speaking their lan-
guage” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 15), generally underwent a process of acculturation 
by name changing (Chinese names changed to Western names):
[Clarice] had come with her father and his four brothers. The eldest brother 
was Cheung Chang Bo, who later changed his name to Arnold Chung; his 
wife, Jun, changed her name to Margaret Chung. They came with their two 
sons, Ming (who became Joseph Chung) and Ling (who became Jacob Chung). 
Her father was the second of the brothers. His name was Cheung Mu Bo but he 
changed it to George Chung. Her mother’s name was She, but she changed it 
to Sheila. The third brother was Cheung Sam Bak; he became Peter Chung and 
married a Hakka woman, Gloria Lee. The youngest brother, Cheung Wan Bak, 
became Bertram Chung; he, too, married a Hakka, Henrietta Chin. (Shine-
bourne, 
2015
, p.25)
The name of Clarice is also changed from Cheung Tse to Clarice Chung, a name 
given to her by Clarice Johnson, who is a black servant of white overseers, and her 
name is changed again later to Clarice Wong after her marriage with John Wong, 
a Hakka man. As Butler (
1997
, p. 34) observes, the effect of reiterative naming is 
“to indicate and establish a subject in subjection, to produce its social contours in 
space and time” and to sediment “its ‘positionality’ over time.” Chinese immigrants 
changed their names to start a new life with a new name that fit the host culture and 
to be recognised and positioned in colonial Caribbean society. However, this act of 
name changing also suggests that one is subject to the potential of being named and 
renamed, which is described by Butler (
1997
, p. 30) as “the vulnerability to being 
named [that] constitutes a constant condition of the speaking subject.” This situa-
tion means that the name is always impermanent, and the identity secured through 
the name and its change is also never permanent but depends on social contexts and 
situations. The abandonment of Chinese names indicates the loss of original iden-
tity, which creates incessant anxiety in the Chinese diaspora. For instance, Clarice 
always stresses her ‘authentic’ Chineseness and worries continuously that she and 
her children will lose this authenticity. Meanwhile, Susan Leo, the Chinese mother 
of Clarice’s daughters-in-law, and Susan’s daughters, having “lost all their Chinese-
ness” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 143), suffer from feelings of inadequacy and inferiority 
for being not “real Chinese” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 22). When Chinese immigrants 
attempt to derive a sense of self from new identity-conferring names, the Chinese 
names they abandon still lurk in the background, which is implicitly reflected in 
the abovementioned concern with Chineseness. This condition is smilar to Butler’s 
argument that “the more one seeks oneself in language, the more one loses oneself 
precisely there where one is sought” (Butler, 
1997
, p. 30).
Names, being performative, can represent whom they indicate while destabilis-
ing them, as demonstrated in the case of nicknames. Clarice is called “
The Old Lady
” 
(Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 9; italics in the original) by everyone in Canefield, Berbice, 
although she is not old when she moves there. The other people in the village refuse to 

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call her Clarice but use the nickname ‘The Old Lady,’ which blurs her identity because 
it “could have meant any old lady” and marks her outsider status as “it was her Chi-
neseness that made her seem old, to the point of being 
ancient
, like China, and this is 
why the title stuck to her” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 9; italics in the original). As Kon-
stantina Georgelou and Janez Janša (
2017
, p. 2) point out, names “designate and enact 
cultural codes, social status and power regimes.” The nickname not only challenges 
Clarice’s subjectivity by cancelling the effect of her other names but also alienates and 
marginalises her as someone not recognised by the community. Her diasporic perform-
ative subjectivity is constrained and effaced because she clings to her Chineseness and 
refuses to make any compromises.
The two family names, Chung and Wong, stand for two different discourses that tus-
sle with each other to constitute the subject, as demonstrated in the following words of 
Clarice: “I is Chung too, I is Clarice Chung! Me name change to Wong when I married 
John Wong; he was Hakka Chinee, but I ain’t no Hakka, me Chung family was Punti, 
so I keep me Chung name. I tell people call me ‘Miss Chung’” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, 
p. 22). The Chung family, who move upwards to become “a prominent middle-class 
clan” in British Guiana (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 26), construct a myth about their “royal 
blood,” superior intelligence and identity as “real Chinee people” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, 
p. 91). Thus, the name Chung signifies an authentic Chinese identity, which causes 
Clarice to insist on being called ‘Miss Chung,’ although ironically, her Chineseness 
leads only to the local community’s persistent use of the nickname ‘The Old Lady’ to 
address/dismiss her. In contrast, Wong, as the name of a Hakka family in the novel, rep-
resents an elastic and hybrid identity. This is because Hakka, literally meaning “guest 
people” or “strangers” (Constable, 
1996
, p. 3) in opposition to ‘Punti,’ native residents, 
in the Chinese language, are noted for their active domestic and transnational migration 
as well as their adopted process of “identity-elasticization” and embrace of “border-
less multiple-identity” (Leo, 
2015
, pp. 154–157). Unlike Clarice, who sticks to her Chi-
neseness, or Susan, who completely abandons her Chinese part, their granddaughter 
Joan carves out a third way to negotiate her identity—that is, by embracing her multiple 
heritages:
She had never seen herself as a Chung, but a Wong, the child of her mother, Mary 
Leo, and father, Frederick Wong, neither of whom had ever spoken a word of 
Chinese and had a troubled relationship with their Chinese heritage. Mary had 
never thought of herself as real Chinese because she was only half Chinese, and 
according to the Chungs, the Chinese side of her was invalidated by her Indian 
half. (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 146)
By identifying herself as a Wong, Joan, predicated on the flexible identity-making of 
Hakka people, constitutes for herself a hybrid performative subjectivity in a diasporic 
context.

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The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity…