Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T02:23:36.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 13 - Queer Diasporic Crossings and the Persistence of Desire in The Book of Salt

from Part IV - Key Words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

Siobhan B. Somerville
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Get access

Summary

This chapter reflects on theorizations of “queer diasporas” through an analysis of Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt (2003). A crucial, though not uncontested, concept, “queer diaspora” investigates the global circulations and alterations of “queer” practices, identities, and economies as well as the incommensurate meanings and valuations of nonnormative gender-sexual formations across disparate geopolitical locations. The Book of Salt illustrates and complicates these precepts by rewriting the story of expatriate modernism in Paris from the perspective of a queer, exiled, Vietnamese cook employed in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s salon. The novel’s portrayals of queer diasporic crossings in Saigon and Paris refuse presumptions of queer commonality across social hierarchies as well as teleological narratives of gender-sexual liberation in the move from colony to metropole, while insisting on the narrator’s persistent pursuit of his queer desires in the face of repeated betrayal and nonreciprocity. It thus becomes the reader’s ethical obligation to respond sympathetically to the narrator’s temporally impossible call and recognize his subjective account.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

Allen, Jafari S.Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, nos. 2–3 (2012): 211–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackwood, Evelyn, and Wieringa, Saskia E., eds. Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Chen, Jian Neo. Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Cotten, Trystan T., ed. Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition. New York: Routledge, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grewal, Inderpal, and Kaplan, Caren. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 663–79.Google Scholar
Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luibhéid, Eithne, and Cantú, Lionel Jr., eds. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Meghani, Shamira A.Global Desires, Postcolonial Critique: Queer Women in Nation, Migration, and Diaspora.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, edited by Medd, Jodie, 60–75. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Patton, Cindy, and Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno, eds. Queer Diasporas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth A., and Chauncey, George. “Thinking Sex Transnationally: An Introduction.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 439–50.Google Scholar
Schulman, Sarah. Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha.Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, nos. 2–3 (2008): 191–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×