[In the following essay, McLeod examines Mo’s Sour Sweet in terms of the postmodern and postcolonial theories of Homi K. Bhabha.]

Exploring the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonialism in the context of literary criticism is almost like being party to a particularly messy divorce. These erstwhile theoretical bedfellows have, in the last ten years, drifted further and further apart. Much of what each might offer the other has been lost beneath a growing volume of accusation, hostility and mutual suspicion. Once, it seems, postcolonial theory appeared entirely compatible with a postmodernist sensibility. Both attacked the tyranny of certainty, the relationship between language and power, and those metanarratives of legitimation that had acted as the philosophical props for such things as one’s identity, the pursuit of reason, and colonial rule. As Michael Keith and Malcolm Cross neatly summarise when discussing the politics of identity, ‘the questions which have dominated postmodernist cultural theory for the past decade are precisely those that writers in the anti-imperialist and post-colonial traditions have been addressing for the past century (and longer)’ (Keith and Cross 1993:22). Yet it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile each aesthetic practice. Increasingly, postcolonial critics accuse postmodernists of dispensing with certain vital concepts—especially historical reference—in their proposal that all is now ‘hyperreal’ or ‘simulacra’. As Simon During has pointed out, postcolonialism often functions ‘by accepting and using those practices and concepts (representation, history, evaluation) which postmodernism most strenuously denies’ (During 1985:369). These have been lost in the fun-house of postmodernism, threatened by its promiscuous, cheerful subjectivism. Reference and representation have denounced their previous intimacy, and the postmodernists endlessly celebrate the end of the affair. Furthermore, in a neat reversal of this logic, postmodernists decry those critical practices that still use ‘outdated’ empiricist notions of history and reality. Chances of a reunion between postmodernism and postcolonialism seem slim.

My summary of this supposed annulment necessarily leans towards caricature, and polarises into enemy camps a complex constellation of critical positions on the issue. But the substance and legitimacy of this separation is the preoccupation of this essay. Although there are strong reasons for keeping postmodernism and postcolonialism at some distance from each other, there are also appropriate circumstances when their confluence can be critically enabling. Postcolonial critics who declare a boycott on all things postmodernist are in danger of making precisely the kind of ahistorical generalisation that they would otherwise condemn as axiomatic of colonial discourse. If in the past literary criticism has swung too far in one direction, celebrating the happy matrimony of postmodernism and postcolonialism, it now seems to have swung too far in the other.

Postmodernism is fast becoming a dirty word in postcolonial criticism. Things were not always this way. In the 1980s Linda Hutcheon did much to bring postmodernist aesthetics into line with a postcolonial opposition to the dominant discourses of Western modernity. In a series of provocative, if repetitive, books (Hutcheon 1988, 1990) Hutcheon argued that the dominant modes of postmodernist writing—parody, irony, metafictional self-consciousness—were well suited to the attempts of postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie to make ‘the different, the off-centre, a vehicle for aesthetic and even political conscience raising—perhaps the first and necessary step to radical change’ (Hutcheon 1988:70). But by the early 1990s she had become more pessimistic in the confluence of postmodernism and postcolonialism, arguing that ‘the postcolonial, like the feminist, is a dismantling but also constructive political enterprise insofar as it implies a theory of agency and social change that the postmodern deconstructive impulse lacks’ (Hutcheon 1991:183). In her recent article (Hutcheon 1994) concerning the ill-fated exhibition ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ that occurred between November 1989 and August 1990 at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, she turns her attention to the incompatibility of postmodernist aesthetics and postcolonial concerns, and the disastrous results their confluence can create. The criticism of others has reinforced this notion of incompatibility.¹ For example, Judie Newman’s recent study of intertextuality in postcolonial fiction is at great pains to rescue intertextuality from its accustomed refuge within postmodernist aesthetics, as if labelling it ‘postmodern’ threatens its critical efficacy. For her, the resemblances between postmodernism and postcolonialism are ‘illusory’ (Newman 1995:ix). Postmodernism is practised in the main by critics ‘almost entirely male, white and metropolitan. [It] is thus often a means of packaging and commodifying an acceptable form of dissent’ (Newman 1995:ix). According to Newman, postcolonial writers are especially aware of the determining relationship between narrative and lived reality, how the stories that get told come to shape the lives we lead. Their intertextual experiments are an attempt to interrupt dominant imperialist ideologies that have previously defined them, assuming that power for themselves. Thus, ‘postcolonial writers are therefore often at their politically sharpest, when they are also at their most literary’ (Newman 1995:4). But woe betide anyone who dares call this metafictional self-consciousness a postmodernist attribute, as Hutcheon did a decade previous.

A welcome voice in the debate comes from Elleke Boehmer. She concedes that postmodern and postcolonial critical theory cross ‘in their concern with marginality, ambiguity, disintegrating binaries, and all things parodied, piebald, dual, mimicked, borrowed and second hand’ (Boehmer 1995:244). But, as she warns, historical specificity must not be sacrificed too readily. ‘Criticism must address itself to the particularity of different textual situations’ (Boehmer 1995:248). Readers need to bear witness to cultural specificity in their reading practices, an omission made too frequently by postmodernists. However, I want to suggest that this point, ostensibly a warning against engaging too readily with a postmodernist sensibility, can be mobilised to sanction a productive reunion between postmodernism and postcolonialism. Obviously, not all postcolonial textual situations can be understood with recourse to postmodernist aesthetics. But some certainly can, and bearing witness to their situatedness requires a rendezvous between postmodernism and postcolonialism. In particular, there are a significant number of recent novels written in English, within Britain, whose textual situatedness can be explored by bringing together postmodernist and postcolonialist critical practices for a tense reunion. Such fiction has been produced by a group of writers that Steven Connor describes as ‘outsiders who were once previously held spatially and culturally at a distance [and] have returned or have doubled-back to the distant imperial centres to which they had previously been connected, as it were, only by their separation’ (Connor 1996:85). Connor cites Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro as typical (Connor 1996:86). Such writers, I think, clearly engage with postmodern concerns yet are preoccupied with political issues and theoretical concepts akin to postcolonial critical practices.² A brief reading of Timothy Mo’s second novel Sour Sweet (1982) will demonstrate, I hope, the productivity of working with the discourses of postmodernism and postcolonialism when reading this fiction, not least because the textual situation under study sanctions this approach.

One of the problems of working with both postmodernism and postcolonialism stems from the awkward task of defining these multifarious and wide-ranging concepts, more umbrella terms than accurate signifiers. As Hans Bertens warns: ‘postmodernism is an exasperating term, and so are postmodern, postmodernist, postmodernity, and whatever else one might come across in the way of derivation’ (Bertens 1995:3). Ann McClintock is similarly exasperated by the term ‘post-colonial’, especially as it is too often used as a singular category that ‘may license too readily a panoptic tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of political nuance’ (McClintock 1993:293). As Stephen Slemon rightly argues, the term describes ‘a remarkably heterogeneous set of subject positions, professional fields, and critical enterprises’ (Slemon 1994:16). We are reminded once again of the importance of situatedness when tackling texts in this area. In what follows, then, I am using a specific theorising of postcolonialism and postmodernism derived from the work of Homi Bhabha. This is not to say that Bhabha’s understanding of these terms is more accurate or theoretically sound than the work of others, or that his work is not free from problems. But it is to say that his approach aligns itself with the textual situation of novels such as Sour Sweet, and can enable a productive reading of this fascinating novel.

Bhabha locates his model of postcolonialism squarely within the terms of the postmodern critique of the grand narratives of the West. He finds a contiguity between the lack of faith in Western modernity as rehearsed by Lyotard and a similar re-appraisal voiced by writers who have emerged from once oppressed cultural groups—indeed, the suggestion is that the former cannot be separated from the latter. This is an important manoeuvre, and I want to spend a moment exploring it. It is necessary to grasp a revealing correspondence between Bhabha’s location of postcolonialism and his theorising of colonial discourse that needs examining. Much of Bhabha’s work examines the apparently binary power relations between colonial self and other in colonial discourse. Yet he refuses such binary logic by locating an ambivalence that disrupts its authority. Bhabha returns constantly to ‘the image of the post-Enlightenment man tethered to, not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of the colonised man, that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs and divides the very time of his being’ (Bhabha 1994:44). Bhabha’s attention to the tethering of coloniser to colonised is especially interesting. In his essay ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, he focuses upon the colonial subject educated in the language and culture of the colonising West. This ‘mimic man’ unsettles the binary opposition of colonial self and colonised other. He occupies an ambivalent position between difference and resemblance. In one respect his identity is fixed as fundamentally different from the colonising subject. But his knowledge of the colonisers’ language and culture disavows that difference. Bhabha describes the mimic man as partial presence, a ‘subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994:86). As Robert Young summarises, when confronted with the colonised subject ‘the coloniser sees a grotesquely displaced image of himself … the surveilling eye is suddenly confronted with a returning gaze of otherness and finds that its mastery, its sameness, is undone’ (Young 1990:147). The ambivalent disruption of colonial discourse occurs interstitially—between coloniser and colonised, derision and desire, difference and resemblance. Resulting from Bhabha’s work on identity is ‘a strategy of ambivalence in the structure of identification that occurs precisely in the elliptical in-between, where the shadow of the other falls upon the self’ (Bhabha 1994:60).

Although Bhabha refutes the binary logic of colonial discourse, there remains in place the circuit of power relations that keeps the coloniser and colonised tethered. My point is that Bhabha configures the postcolonial in very similar terms, as a kind of tethering to the dominant power. The postcolonial texts that feature in his criticism (specifically work by Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie) are always located in an ambivalent circuit that binds them to the disruption of the master narratives of Western epistemology. Within this circuit an ambivalent, interstitial space is discovered that is assumed to be productive. Bhabha certainly shares Lyotard’s affirmative sense of the end of grand narratives. Sensing perhaps the potential vacuity of postmodernist aesthetics, he aims to ‘rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial’ (Bhabha 1994:175). The end of grand narratives licenses the production of new histories by those previously silenced (Bhabha 1994:4–5). Bhabha argues that the West ‘must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its narrative identity’ (Bhabha 1994:6). But these new dissident histories remain ultimately tethered to the West because their purpose seems primarily the redefinition of Western knowledge. This begs the question whether these newly authorised voices are ever completely free from the hegemony of the traditional colonial centres. They seem to function like the mimic man, splitting the authority of the West by rewriting its history as an ambivalent shadow of its former self. And just as the tethering of coloniser and colonised subjects produced a mode of subversion that emerged from a space in-between, so too does the unequal encounter between two cultures facilitate an interstitial space of possibility that Bhabha names the postcolonial:

The postcolonial perspective—as it is being developed by cultural historians and literary theorists—departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or ‘dependency’ theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalist or ‘nativist’ pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces the recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres.

(Bhabha 1994:173)

A space of possibility is opened interstitially and claimed as the location of the postcolonial. In this model, the postcolonial does not exist outside of the circuit marked by the polarities of coloniser and colonised. It emerges at an ambivalent border-space in-between a structure of opposition.

This is a particular kind of postcolonial perspective, one that bears witness to the tethering of the colonised to the colonising cultures while recognising within this relationship the room for subversion. Bhabha must be criticised for assuming the particular postcolonial perspective he builds as universal in his book The Location of Culture. He threatens to homogenise a vast and varied terrain of cultural practices. The assumption that all postcolonial literature is always writing back to the centre continues the privileging of the West common to colonial discourse, and is remarkably ahistorical in its lack of attention to the situatedness of postcolonial texts. But Bhabha’s model can be returned to history if we notice how it speaks to a certain body of texts. His version of the ‘postcolonial perspective’ is indicative of a specific terrain that circumscribes the work of writers such as Timothy Mo, to whom I now turn in order to demonstrate the productivity of working Bhabha’s model. In Sour Sweet, I suggest, we can discover Bhabha’s interstitial spaces of possibility struggling to become concrete.

Mo is often described as ‘Anglo-Chinese’ (Facknitz 1991:648). He was born in Hong Kong to an English mother and Cantonese father. At the age of ten he moved to England, in 1960, where he later attended Oxford University and read history. The fact of Mo’s birth in Hong Kong convinces many that his work is primarily preoccupied with postcolonial concerns, especially as he left a colonised location to be educated at, and later work in, the old centre of the British Empire. For Mark A.R. Facknitz, Mo is ‘a quintessential writer of two Empires, the Celestial and the British, the one defeated, the second now gone beyond decadence to dust’ (Facknitz 1991:649). As a migrant writer with his own tethering to the old imperial centre, Mo occupies that peculiar position place both within and without, belonging and not-belonging. His novel, Sour Sweet, at one level explores the productivity of this position in terms similar to Bhabha’s. It enables us to assess the productivity of Bhabha’s interstitial space of possibility by depicting a migrant Chinese family attempting to live at that peculiar border-space both between and beyond, here specifically the compulsion of British racism and Chinese obligation. Yet Mo’s conclusions about the productivity of this space differ somewhat from Bhabha’s; indeed, if Bhabha’s work assists in reading the textual situatedness of Sour Sweet, then Mo’s novel certainly enables a critical evaluation of Bhabha’s model.

Set in the early years of the 1960s, Sour Sweet depicts the fortunes of two groups of Chinese who have migrated to London. One group is the family of the Chens, consisting of Chen, his wife Lily, their son Man Kee, and Lily’s sister Mui. The other is the Triads, a Chinese secret society whose affairs include the trafficking of drugs in London. Chen is employed as a waiter in a restaurant in Chinatown. When his father runs into debt in Hong Kong, Chen borrows money from the Triads. Later he is approached by one of them, Roman Fok, and told he must assist in their illicit trade in narcotics. In an attempt to escape from this task, Chen buys a house he believes is remote from the Triads’ influence in London. Here he opens a Chinese take-away with Lily and Mui. Lily remains oblivious to his involvement with the Triads. Eventually Chen is located and ordered to be killed. A bewildered Lily is left alone at the take-away, mystified by Chen’s disappearance.

As migrant Chinese, the Chens face two forces of compulsion. The first concerns the attitudes of the British to the influx of migrants in the 1960s. The novel opens with the narrator describing Chen’s sense of himself as an ‘interloper’ (Mo 1982:1) in the eyes of the British. He ‘could sense [this] in between his shoulder-blades as he walked past emptying public houses on his day off; in the shrinking of his scalp as he heard bottles rolling in the gutter; in a descending silence at a dark bus-stop and its subsequent lifting; in an unspoken complicity between himself and others like him, not necessarily his own’ (1). The second comes from the Triads, who control both the legitimate and illicit businesses in Chinatown. The violent world of the Triads is, of course, a caricature of Chinese culture. But the Triads function as an agency of control derived from the Chens’ inherited culture, one that they attempt to live beyond. In short, Sour Sweet depicts a family attempting to clear a space where they might live at a remove from both British and Chinese coercive attitudes.

As the novel opens, there is already a sense of their existence between two cultures. The Chens have lived in Britain for four years, ‘which was long enough to have lost their place in the society from which they had emigrated but not long to feel comfortable in the new’ (1). This interstitial position is later suggested by some richly described physical locations. Two are worthy of comment. The first is a passageway that Chen uses as a short cut between the restaurant where he works in Chinatown, and Leicester Square:

Chen’s restaurant was in Soho, just off Gerrard street and its complex of travel agencies, supermarkets, fortune tellers, quack acupuncturists and Chinese cinema clubs, in a quiet lane whose only establishments were restaurants. At the end of the row was a passage with a double bend, so that what seemed to strangers like a blind alley was in reality a concealed entrance, constructed on the same principle as a lobster trap. A sharp right turn after passing an iron bollard took the knowledgeable or intrepid into a gloomy canyon formed by the blind backs of two forty-feet high Georgian terraces. Rubbish filled the alley. At night the rats scrabbled in the piles of rotting vegetable leaves and soggy cardboard boxes. There was a muffled silence in the enclosure. At the other end another series of baffles led, quite suddenly, into the brightness and sound of Leicester Square. This was Chen’s habitual short-cut to the Underground station.

(26–7—emphasis added)

This quotation is interesting for several reasons. The detail accumulated in the description seems recorded for those who are unfamiliar with Chinatown and also, quite obviously, English-speakers. The passageway is a short-cut for Chen but appears a dead end for ‘strangers’. To whom does this space belong? Native Londoners, it seems, are unfamiliar with this particular route. Those that hazard beyond the sharp right turn are either ‘knowledgeable’—like Chen or the narrator—or ‘intrepid’, the latter term conveying a sense of an explorer wandering into an unknown and faintly threatening space. The use of the phrase ‘quite suddenly’ in describing the emergence into Leicester Square suggests an element of surprise for the stranger, a surprise not shared by the Chen to whom the emergence into the square would be quite familiar. Spatially, the passage is in-between Chinatown and conventional London. It is not the sole property of either place. This passageway suggests the space the Chens search for in the novel, one that is between the English and the Chinese. It is a space both enabling and dangerous, one that provides a helpful passage, but is for the intrepid only.

In similar terms, the acquisition of the Chens’ take-away can be understood as an attempt to secure a space that is interstitial, and both enabling and dangerous. Chen wants to open a business as far away from the reach of the Triads as possible. The house he eventually buys exists at a place that is also at a remove from the British. The narrator’s description of the house and its surroundings suggests that a new space is being opened by the Chens that had not existed previously in quite the same form. Consider the narration of the Chens’ journey to their new home, as they walk through an unfamiliar and deserted part of London:

It became apparent that the main road formed an unofficial kind of boundary. The side they were now on was older, more dilapidated than the north side, a change which took place with startling swiftness. They had been walking for three minutes and already the houses were visibly decayed. They passed a derelict terrace, the doors and windows covered with corrugated tin sheets; through rusted holes in the crinkled metal they could see grass growing in the roofless rooms. There was still a sofa in one of the ruined houses and its springs had burst out of the rotten cloth like a robot’s innards. This was more like it, Chen thought with satisfaction; they would start here. It was ideal.

(84—emphasis added)

The location of their house is on this site, beyond a boundary. It rests upon the remains of a previous community. The site bears the traces of an earlier habitat, but it now lies vacant. If this derelict space signifies the decline of a community that was once the home of the British, for the Chens it is a place of new possibility. Its existence beyond the boundary of the main road is perhaps symbolic; it suggests that Chen has discovered a boundary that marks the limits of the influence exerted by both the Triads and the English. It is interesting that the Chens also consider a property within the boundary of the main road, one that is being repaired by some workmen. The workmen unsettle Chen as they remind him of the ‘peppery’ (83) English he avoids when walking past pubs at night. He recalls that sense of hostility towards his difference that is mentioned in the novel’s opening. But beyond the boundary of the main road there seems no interest in rebuilding or maintaining the houses that lie derelict. The British do not seem to cross the boundary regularly. The ‘demolition site’ (85) offers the Chens the possibility of establishing a space within Britain that is not the sole property of the English and Chinese. The only other occupant Chen meets on the site is Mr Constantinides, the proprietor of a garage, who is presumably a Greek migrant. The house Chen eventually chooses in this location is similarly suggestive:

Their shop, their home, could not pretend to have been anything other than an ordinary house up till then. Originally it had been the eastern wing of a terrace of three houses. The centre and western wing had been hit by a bomb in the war and subsequently demolished but a freak effect of the blast had left Chen’s house unscathed. Two big braces, such as they had seen on the big demolition site, supported the western wall. The previous occupant, and Chen had no idea who he or she had been, had left over five years ago. No one had wanted the property. Being so near a garage hadn’t helped either.

(89–90)

Like the site as a whole, the house is vacant and unwanted. The fact that its west wing has been demolished while its eastern wing remains is particularly apposite. It tempts us to consider the demolition site as the beginnings of another ‘east wing’, a place that will support those newly arrived from the East. These forgotten ruins existing just beyond a boundary promise a site of possibility for the Chens, a place they can fashion for themselves beyond outside interference.

It is, however, a fragile space that requires constant protection. The Chens continue to be encroached upon by those forces across the boundary that Chen in particular wishes to escape. Once the Chens have settled in their home, decorated it and opened the take-away, they are still threatened by forces of coercion. In particular, Lily and Mui in different ways work hard to defend their space from threats beyond the border. At one point, Man Kee suffers an attack at his school. This prompts Lily to teach her son some basic boxing techniques she learned from her father as a child. She is unwilling to approach the school authorities to complain, as ‘that way you drew attention to yourself, made trouble for the powers that be, and then they got at you indirectly’ (231). Mui is critical of the tradition of fighting that Lily teaches her son, condemning it as a ‘fierce and mindless’ (233) response to Man Kee’s attack. Lily is motivated by a continuing fear of encroachment, and her resilience and determination make it difficult to condemn her response to the aggression of others. Mui also protects their space. She devises the means to keep the business financially independent. She provides the link between the take-away and Mr. Constantinides’ garage, carrying food to the many truck drivers who buy from the take-away by placing an order at the garage. Her connections with the truck drivers enable the Chens to buy a cheap supply of Coca-Cola which they sell at a large profit. It is also her ‘brainwave’ (141) to sell chips that proves highly successful. Like Lily, Mui also uses some of the things she learnt as a child to cope with the contingencies of the present. For example, when Mui buys a van from Mr Constantinides, she defends her decision to a sceptical Lily by recounting a lesson she learnt from her father:

‘Which of Mr. Constantinides’ cars was best? I will tell you: the little one with the window so dirty you couldn’t even look inside. It had a stout heart. Do you remember the story Father used to tell us about the blind sage and how he could tell which of the Duke of Chou’s race-horses was the fastest?’

Lily smiled pityingly at Mui.

But Mui was right. The motor ran sweetly when an obliging mechanic tuned it for them. When Lily kicked the tyres (secretly hoping to bring down the van down in a heap of folding, groaning metal) the tyres were hard and springy.

(147–8)

Importantly, the sisters do not defend their space with recourse to a blind faith in the validity of inherited learning. The tension between Lily and Mui throughout the novel forces each to appropriate critically the knowledge they learned in childhood in China, conscious of its potential shortcomings. Mui objects to Lily teaching Man Kee to fight; Lily scoffs at Mui’s reasons for choosing the van. This critical revisiting of the past, I suggest, is one component of their attempt to open a space beyond conventional holistic boundaries. As Bhabha argues, to move to a space beyond the limits of received culture is not an act of complete repudiation: ‘the “beyond” is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past … there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the “beyond”: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà—here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth’ (Bhabha 1994:1). Lily's and Mui's defence of their space is an example of that continual movement back and forth between the past and the present for the purposes of survival. They cannot access the past nostalgically, without an awareness of its potential limitations. This is one purpose of their several disagreements throughout the novel. They appropriate the past critically to confront present contingencies. As such, they protect their fragile space through productive negotiation. This strategy begs comparison with Bhabha’s notion of the ‘past-present’. This involves the ‘renew[al] of the past, refiguring it as a contingent “in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The “past-present” becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living’ (Bhabha 1994:7). The sisters select from their past in an attempt to forge a new life in the present in-between Chinese and English cultures: necessity constantly thwarts an uncritical nostalgic return.

But the Chens never break free completely from the influence of the British and the Triads. Lily is unsettled by the visits of the tax-man and the social worker, and these visits remind both the reader and the Chens that the Chens’ space is still not fully their own to do with as they please. Lily’s relations with the English, especially her customers, remain antagonistic. The influence of the Triads also reaches across the boundary. They locate Chen’s whereabouts through the remittances Lily sends to Hong Kong, as these reveal his postal district in London. The murder of Chen exposes the fragility of the Chens’ space. Coercive forces still have the power to move back and forth across the symbolic boundary of the main road, confronting the Chens with a series of continuing challenges. The Chens’ space is not particularly stable nor as remote from coercion as Chen and Lily might wish, and this is a cause of concern in the text. The boundary that separates their home from the influence of the British and the Triads is permeable, not absolute. The Chens ultimately remain tethered to the forces they wish to live beyond. In contrast to Bhabha’s optimistic theorising, in the novel tethering is never fully transformed into a secure foundation of possibility.

Sour Sweet suggests in concrete terms the productivity of a postcolonial space of possibility where coercive forces no longer function. But there remains a fracture between the promise of this space and its establishment. The novel closes with the departure of Mui from the Chens’ take-away, when Mui leaves to get married. She invites Lily to join her, but Lily declines. The vocabulary used by the narrator in describing the sisters’ separation is interesting in the current context:

this was the end of the old life, the life of the loving, closely knit family Mui and Lily knew they had been. … There had been parturition, the single cell had contracted, swelled, and through the wall had escaped matter from its very nucleus. Now there were two cells, sharing the same territory, happily co-existing but quite autonomous.

And, later, Lily discovered there was nothing much to regret about this, not too much to be wistful about; or only in so far as it gave her something in common with Mui.

(277)

There is a powerful dissonance in this passage that raises questions about the space the Chens make for themselves in the novel. Mui’s leaving marks an end to a way of life that emphasised resilience and resourcefulness. The ‘loving, closely knit’ family may have been a place of tension, as evidenced by the friction between Lily and Mui. But there is a sense that something is also lost in its dissolution. The narrator informs us in the first paragraph that the new units of the family will happily co-exist. But in the next, doubts are raised immediately about Lily’s happiness. The fact that she takes time to learn that there was nothing ‘much’ to regret about Mui’s departure suggests a melancholy on Lily’s part. Lily’s disquiet implies that something is being lost as her family splits. A dissonance is created through the conjuring of two moods, one happy, the other more muted and pensive. This dissonance is supplemented by the metaphor of parturition the narrator uses to describe what has happened to the Chens. On the one hand, parturition suggests fertility, growth and development. It implies that the Chens have survived happily, and have coped positively with the challenge of their migrancy. But parturition is also an organic process of change and refinement, devoid of stability or fixity. Such stability might be vital to a strategy of survival. The mobility of the family unit perhaps disqualifies the possibility of a loving, closely knit family. This constant mobility and emphasis upon change is a source of trauma as well as a strategy for survival. For Bhabha mobility is inherently positive. Sour Sweet questions that assumption. The splitting of the family perhaps disqualifies resources that could prove useful to Lily and Mui, in particular a protective sense of community that can compensate for the disorientation of living in a new place.

This novel, then, can be read against Bhabha’s location of the postcolonial perspective. If we approach his work through Sour Sweet, I believe we discover a pessimism that constitutes a critique of the productivity of a space at the cultural boundaries of the English and the Chinese. For Bhabha, boundaries are exciting and valuable as they ‘initiate new signs of identity, and innovate sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself’ (Bhabha 1994:1–2). Sour Sweet can be read as approaching this space with caution, perhaps pointing up the difficulties involved in preserving a space between and beyond cultures, one that is not already the property of any one cultural group. We are left to ponder the extent to which the Chens have negotiated successfully strategies sufficient for survival as well as their success in fulfilling the promise that the demolition site suggested. I believe Sour Sweet qualifies an enthusiasm for Bhabha’s space at the cusp of the postmodern and the postcolonial by exposing its fragility and exploring the trauma of protecting it from coercive forces that still have agency. In Sour Sweet, such a space seems fragile. The constant negotiations and splittings of the family enable strategies of survival that involve a critical appropriation of past knowledge, but also produce a dissonant, muted tone of melancholy as the novel closes.

In conclusion, I am suggesting that the failed relationships of the Chen family act to subdue an enthusiasm for Bhabha’s confidence in the productive confluence of postmodernism and postcolonialism. But this does not disqualify the appropriateness of forging their reunion between them in order to bear witness to the textual situation of Mo’s novel. Bhabha’s work enables a productive reading of Sour Sweet, even if its exuberance and optimism for interstitial sites of possibility are held up to question as a consequence. These sites are at once physical, as in the passageway or the location of the take-away, and aesthetic, as expressed by Lily and Mui’s negotiation between past pedagogy and present contingency. They figure the possibility of survival while recognising the fragility and loss this involves, troubling the confidence that Bhabha places in the boundary as an interstitial space of possibility. In this instance, then, the confluence of postmodernism and postcolonialism assists us in considering Mo’s representation of a specific historical situation. Hopefully, a heightened attention to situatedness might return some of the historical specificity all too often missing in the discourses of both postmodernism and postcolonialism, but also stop those working with the latter dismissing out of hand the potential productivity of appropriating the former when necessary. Such separation can create its own silences.

Notes

1. See in particular the arguments raised by Helen Tiffin and Stephen Slemon in Past The Last Post: Theorising Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (Adam and Tiffin 1991).

2. In making this claim I am not asserting an unproblematic identity for each novelist as postmodern, postcolonial, or both. For a detailed discussion of their relationship with each, see the introduction to my study of J.G. Farrell, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie (McLeod 1995:1–24).

Works Cited

Adam, Ian and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post: Theorising Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Opus, 1995.

Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History 1950–1995. London: Routledge, 1996.

During, Simon. ‘Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?’. Landfall 39 (1985): 368–380.

Facknitz, Mark A. R. ‘Timothy Mo’. Contemporary Novelists (fifth edition). Ed. Leslie Henderson. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. 648–9.

Hutcheon, Linda. ‘The Post Always Rings Twice: the Postmodern and the Postcolonial’. Textual Practice 8.2 (1994).

———. ‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’. Past the Last Post: Theorising Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Eds. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. 167–90.

———. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1990.

———. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988.

Keith, Michael and Malcolm Cross, eds. Racism, the City and the State. London: Routledge, 1993.

McClintock, Anne. ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Postcolonialism”’. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 291–304.

McLeod, John. Rewriting History: Postmodern and Postcolonial Negotiations in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. University of Leeds: Unpublished PhD Dissertation, 1995.

Mo, Timothy. Sour Sweet. London: Abacus, 1982.

Newman, Judie. The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions. London: Edward Arnold, 1995.

Slemon, Stephen. ‘The Scramble for Postcolonialism’. De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality. Eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge, 1994. 15–32.

Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

Additional coverage of Mo’s life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vol. 117; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 194; and Major 20th-Century Writers, Vol. 1.