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Screen 2008 49(4):426-439; doi:10.1093/screen/hjn053
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved

Future perfect loss: Richard Fung's Sea in the Blood

Lily Cho


  Abstract

This essay is about losses that have not yet happened. I suggest that there is some political value in feeling loss as an intimation of an anticipatory future imperfect. This essay seeks to understand how queer diasporic subjects emerge out of loss, and to do so by examining the temporal processes which structure affective collectivities. I argue that Sea in the Blood offers a vision of proleptic loss. In moving the discussion of racial grief for racialized subjects away from the psychic domain, where the individual psyche is still the dominant model, to the domain of reproduction – the family, the transmission of culture and memory. The problem of queer diaspora is thus not seen here as one of assimilation where the individual or the group can seeks to find a place in the heteronormative family or to fit into the host nation, but as a problem of production and reproduction. How do queer diasporic subjects not only preserve but also generate difference? In this essay I shall take the non-biological dimension of reproduction seriously in order to ask how a community not predicated on biological sameness – or literal biological reproduction – can reproduce itself as an affective community without remaining stuck in a perpetual lament over the persistent exclusions from a biologically defined community.


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