Transitive cultures

"Since the early 1990s, Asian American studies scholars have often read migrant texts as diasporic, and have seen the Asian migrant as caught between a mythical homeland and an imperial host country. Transitive Cultures seeks to shift from diaspora as a framework that reinstitutes national categories, to instead consider ways of reading migrant texts across nations and diasporic groups without relying on monolithic and "authentic" racial identities. Christopher B. Patterson reframes Asian migrant texts from diasporic texts to transpacific Anglophone texts in order to archive works deemed "inauthentic" to both nationalist literatures and to American ethnic literatures. Rather than contrast the racial tolerance of the host country with the intolerance of the homeland, these migrant stories show how pluralist governmentality, since the colonial era, has relied heavily upon hyper-visible and monolithic racial identities, and has seen the multiplicity of identity, rather than single nationalist identities, as its main organizing logic. In response, these texts work to express "transitive cultures," cultures defined not by race or origin, but by the shared cultural practice of managing, re-interpreting, and transitioning among imposed racial identities" --