Monkey Hunting
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
3.
How is political conflict directly represented in novels?
Cristina
Garcia. Monkey
Hunting.
(1994,
Cuba)
Supporting References:
- PDF Saved:
Search for Utopia, Desire for the
Sublime: Cristina García's "Monkey Hunting"
Sean Moiles
MELUS
, Vol. 34, No. 4, Translation and Alternative Forms of Literacy
(Winter, 2009), pp. 167-186
Published by:
Oxford
University Press on behalf of The
Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States (MELUS)
Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20618105
- Cho, Yu-Fang. "Reimagining "Tense and Tender Ties" in García's Monkey Hunting." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012): <http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2145>
Abstract. In her article "Reimagining
'Tense and Tender Ties' in Garcia's Monkey Hunting"
Yu-Fang Cho analyses Cristina García's re-narration of transnational
histories of the multi-racial, multi-generational Chinese Cuban
family in Monkey Hunting (2003) as a critical project that
recasts developmental immigrant narratives primarily set in the
United States as part of the emerging cultural archive of global
migrations. Drawing on recent scholarship on comparative
racialization, especially Ann Laura Stoler's formulation of "tense
and tender ties" as a method, Cho examines how García's family
saga unsettles the temporal and spatial logics of Euro-American
modernity through the deployment of cyclical narrative structure that
spatially maps emerging or even unintelligible connections between
disparate life stories. Reading Monkey Hunting as a piece of
imaginative critical historiography, Cho argues that it is through
creative reconceptualization of the structure of history — and the
social relations that it regulates — that García's narrative puts
forward the most radical possible futures under impossible
conditions.
The Chinese-Cuban experience is plumbed
in this graceful third novel by Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban;
The Agüero Sisters), encompassing five far-flung
generations, four countries and two tumultuous centuries. Farm boy
Chen Pan leaves his native China in 1857, dreaming of the riches
awaiting him in mysterious Cuba. Instead, he is obliged to work on a
sugarcane plantation, subjected to the atrocities of forced servitude
in a country that is not his own and in which he is viewed with
suspicion. He eventually manages to escape and creates a life for
himself beyond his wildest dreams, as a successful small-business
owner, beloved husband and doting father. Becoming almost more Cuban
than Chinese, he falls in love with Lucrecia, a former slave. His
mixed-blood descendants, scattered between Cuba and China, struggle
to find their place in a world that strives to keep its ethnic and
geographical boundaries distinct. Chen Fang, a granddaughter raised
as a boy in China, is a remarkable woman who manages to get an
education and become a teacher, eventually landing in one of Mao's
appalling prisons in 1970 Shanghai. As a teenager, great-grandson
Domingo Chen departs Cuba for New York with his father and faces the
same hostility and racism there that Chen Pan dealt with in
mid–19th-century Havana. Domingo's journey from Cuba to New York
then Vietnam is told in unsparing detail, bringing the novel full
circle. Though Garcia ranges farther afield here than in previous
works, her prose is as tight and polished as ever. The book is rather
short for its span, and a bit more development of some
characters—particularly Chen Fang—would have been welcome, but
that is a mere quibble. Garcia's novel is a richly patterned
mini-epic, a moving chorus of distinct voices
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