Reimagining Tense and Tender Ties in García\u27s Monkey Hunting

In her article Reimagining \u27Tense and Tender Ties\u27 in Garcia\u27s Monkey Hunting Yu-Fang Cho analyses Cristina García\u27s re-narration of transnational histories of the multi-racial, multi-generational Chinese Cuban family in Monkey Hunting (2003) as a critical project that recasts developmental immigrant narratives primarily set in the United States as part of the emerging cultural archive of global migrations. Drawing on recent scholarship on comparative racialization, especially Ann Laura Stoler\u27s formulation of tense and tender ties as a method, Cho examines how García\u27s family saga unsettles the temporal and spatial logics of Euro-American modernity through the deployment of cyclical narrative structure that spatially maps emerging or even unintelligible connections between disparate life stories. Reading Monkey Hunting as a piece of imaginative critical historiography, Cho argues that it is through creative reconceptualization of the structure of history — and the social relations that it regulates — that García\u27s narrative puts forward the most radical possible futures under impossible conditions