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

dry food
—boiled 
ground provisions eaten with salted cod in a sauce of fried onions, tomatoes and 
boiled eggs” Mary is skilled at cooking (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 60; italics in the 
original); the English “breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast” cooked by the Indian girl 
Mary employs to do the housework (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 113); and the Chinese 
food such as “Chinese roast duck” and “Chinese soup” her father Frederick and her 
aunt Norma enjoy eating (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 81). Unable to either exclusively 
accept or fully dismiss her Chinese legacy, Joan eventually comes to terms with her 
Chinese-Caribbean identity by performing a hybrid diasporic subjectivity. As Ang 
(
1993
, p. 13) states, “a critical diasporic cultural politics should privilege neither 
host country nor (real or imaginary) homeland, but precisely keep a creative ten-
sion between ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’.” In this in-between space, 
hybrid cultural forms are produced dynamically and creatively. The identity-making 
strategy of the new generations of Chinese-Caribbean women represented by Joan 
is influenced by the rapidly changing sociohistorical and geopolitical context of the 
Caribbean. In the 1960s and 1970s, radical political violence and fervent nationalis-
tic sentiments around the Caribbean independence period prompted the Chinese to 
hide their ethnic identity. Since the 1990s, this sentiment has generally given away 
to issues that are more practical, such as economic development and improvement 
in living standards. As China has advanced economically and invested increasingly 
in the Caribbean, there is a growing tendency in the Caribbean public to view China 
“as an alternative avenue for development” (Grydehøj et al., 
2021
, p. 7). Moreover, 
people in the Caribbean are tending to accept Chinese immigrants, especially those 
who have lived in the region for generations, as potential contributors to Caribbean 
society, which encourages the new generations of Chinese-Caribbean people to 
embrace and celebrate the cultural hybridity resulting from the interactions of multi-
ple cultures, with Chinese culture playing a non-negligible role.