"The mental portfolio of an Eurasian" : Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far – double héritage ou double dépossession?
Résumé
This article focuses on early twentieth-century Eurasian writer Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, widely recognized today as the foremother of Chinese American letters. Her writings testify to the irreducible tensions arising from her own bi-racial legacy and to her complex positioning within the dominant Eurocentric tradition of American literature. Sui Sin Far saw herself as a “connecting link [between] Occidentals and Orientals”; however, this article analyses the way her texts problematize such an optimistic sense of a hyphenated identity. In contrast to the assertive verticality that is associated with the notion of heritage, Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical and fictional works define a wavering space whereby double inheritance runs the risk of proving to be double dispossession. However, this locus of tension is what elicits a poetic art of in-betweenness, which has enabled Sui Sin Far to found a literary tradition, a literary line not exempt, in its turn, of ambiguities.