Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu (review)

Abstract

tiveness, which seems affirmed in the final chapter’s discussion of constrained hope. Emphasizing the possibility of “the sequel” (136) as one such overarching trope might have been one way to shortcircuit that. What would have happened if Watkins had started with this emphasis and gone on to bust open our conventional notion of that literary term? I have the sense that is what Watkins wanted to do with the final chapter—and that, ironically, “the sequel” discussion comes too late. In fact, this was my reaction too on finding in the final chapter an extended reading of Octavia Butler’s unfinished Parable trilogy. Chronologically this is among the earliest among the texts discussed, and an undoubted game-changer in the history of women’s speculative writing. It feels like this discussion could have as easily come at the beginning of the book as at the end—and by treating it as a kind of ur-text for our time, we might indeed have a stronger sense of the feminist literary genealogy that Watkins’s book would provocatively lay out for us. This is no hysterical realism—but rather a development of a specifically feminist mode of realism that Watkins so carefully and provocatively traces for us.