Racialized Flânerie, Commodity Fetish, and Empire’s Cosmopolitan Glamour in Lao She and Jean Rhys

This essay compares the migrant’s urban strolls in two interwar novels: Chinese author Lao She’s Mr. Ma and Son (二馬 Er Ma, 1931) and Anglophone Caribbean writer Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Analyzing “racialized flaneurs” as those whose mobility in the metropolis is entangled with the metropole’s consumption of exotic racial images, the essay observes the diasporic lives of Chinese antique shop owner Ma Zereng and the white creole tourist Sasha Jansen at the intersection of racialization and economic exchange. By bringing together a novel told from outside imperial whiteness and one told from the ostensible inside, the essay looks at how the empire’s project of cosmopolitan self-fashioning fails in negotiating other transcultural dynamics it capitalizes on. For protagonists who approximate or pass as flaneurs, the essay suggests, the disruption of smooth metropolitan exchange can allow intimacies to resurface through experiences of entrapment, creating new possibilities of coexistence.