Desire and Asian Diasporic Fiction: Democracy and the Representative Status of Onoto Watanna’sMiss Numè of Japan(1899)

Abstract

“Onoto Watanna,” the pseudo-Japanese penname of the mixed-race Chinese Winnifred Eaton, acts as a “Bad Grandma” of the Asian North American literary tradition. Building upon Susan Koshy’s and Lisa Lowe’s accounts of the Asian American novel, I approach Watanna’s Miss Numè of Japan (1899) as the “first Asian American novel” representative of an accommodationist, rather than resistant, tendency “Asian American” representation that anticipates the aggregate and disaggregate problems and possibilities of that political formation in US liberal democracy. The novel, a tale of interracial romances set in Japan, tracks the uncomfortable tensions and convergences of desire and Asian diasporic fiction that speaks to the heteronormative bourgeois construction of anti-Black settler colonial “Asian America.” By tapping into the seduction and marriage plot traditions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century (white) domestic fiction, Miss Numè racially recodes the genre’s processes of meaning-making about freedom, coercion, and material stability onto a comparative global stage. The romances allegorize negotiations between Japan and the US as two rising global imperialist powers, asymmetries of power coded as Asiatic racialized gender. Miss Numè traces fantasies of individualist desire inextricable from the novel’s status as a compromised origin for the Asian American novel and Asian Americanist coalitional politics.With this “bad” early entry in the Asian American literary tradition, the beginnings of a cross-ethnic Asian sensibility reveals the bourgeois fantasies of diasporic desire at its very emergence, not as a postlapsarian ossification.