Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 21

Orientation via Orientalism:
Chinatown in Detective Narratives
In this paper I consider detective narratives as an urban “tour,” a scenic
excursion that seeks to gaze on and narrate a scene of urban horror or dystopia.
This scene is not wholly unlike Jameson’s frustrated narrative path through the
Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. Like Jameson, who has argued that the postmodern
contours of “hyper-reality” defy the human instinct to cognitively map a linear
narrative trajectory through “the great global multinational and decentred
communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects”
(84), detective narratives seek to map paths through unknowable urban spaces that
often defy the subject’s attempts to cognitively or linearly map a clear trajectory thus the twists and turns, the many deferrals of the generic detective text. I intend
to look at this process with specific attention to the deployment of various
“Chinatowns” in detective fiction - and the associated orientalism that Edward
Said refers to - as a specific urban local that functions as a disorienting dystopia.
The mobilisation of “Chinatowns” in these texts moreover, repetitively insist on
the age old positioning of the unfathomable Orient against the knowable Occident;
usually the anglo-detective’s role is constructed as a “pathfinder” and mystery
solver amongst the streets of the “little orient.”
From its earliest examples, detective fiction abounds with racist imagery.
Despite the fact that the “Golden Age” fiction of the interbellum and the American
hard-boiled usually villainized one of “its own”, these narratives often made use
of the inbuilt prejudices of its readership in order to depict an untrustworthy character
who was not usually the principal villain; the “orientation of villainy” is one outcome
of such a device (Watson 109). Yet, as Watson notes, the repetitive drawing of
“Chinese villainy”- located in the heart of the western city in various “Chinatowns”
- goes back further than this. “Chinatown” became a literary site which posits
Eastern otherness at the heart of Western civilization’s great cities, creating specific
anxieties about urbanism from the late eighteenth century onwards. As I intend to
show, the early narrative attempts to separate “Chinatown” from the city as a whole
are continually undermined by the location of Chinatowns, which are traditionally
placed in fairly central, albeit poor, areas of large cities.
In Fergus Hume’s The Mystery o f a Hansom Cab (published in 1887) an
entourage of white males, including a detective, walk through the streets of
Melbourne’s Chinatown, here depicted as an urban slum shared by Chinese
immigrants, prostitutes, and the poor: