What is a global, comparative approach to multiculturalism? What forms does it or can it take? How is such an approach used to make sense of different discursive practices that originate from but navigate between and even beyond particular national contexts? In other words, to paraphrase a famous expression of Lévi-Strauss, how good is it for us to think with?Footnote ⁴ Wen Jin's Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms has provided some timely and cogent responses to these questions.

A series of political contestations “manifest in and mediated by law, social policy, as well as cultural practices and production” (p. 27), multiculturalism has enjoyed a few competing iterations and arguments in North America in recent decades (pp. 44–51). Against this backdrop, Jin defines multiculturalism as a form of “pluralist universalism,” cultivating “common values and practices as a basis for a functional national identity” and addressing “the particular needs of historically disadvantaged ethno-racial groups” (p. 2). As it is a global phenomenon, Jin sees multiculturalism or its particularizations both emanate from and move beyond a particular national context. To illustrate such dynamics and their inherent tensions and paradoxes, she uses fictional narratives to develop a comparative study of U.S. liberal multiculturalism and China's policy toward ethnic minorities in the post-Cold War era, focusing on how their different but related nation-building projects affect their respective racial and ethnic minorities. In particular, her nuanced analysis of these tensions and paradoxes is both constructive and instructive.

What stands out in Pluralist Universalism is, first, the conceptual framework its author develops and deploys throughout the book. Building on Walter Mignolo's work on border thinking and its entailment of double critique, Jin develops her own double critique, characterizing it as a form of “strategic doubling.” That is, she frames U.S. and Chinese multiculturalisms as two processes of mediation engaged in “the imperative of national coherence and minority demands for autonomy and equality” without attributing the same resonance to them in their respective cultural and political contexts (pp. 7, 9). Such an approach yields comparisons that both recognize intersections and differences and reject normative conceptions of race and ethnicity and thus any mode of comparison that uses one to bolster, justify, or adjudicate the other. Comparisons of this kind further challenge the conventional mappings of the world within the ideological and political contexts as well as any normative commitment to the diffusion of best practices of liberal multiculturalism (pp. 24–25).

Second, Jin's study takes on a decidedly interdisciplinary characteristic. Not only does it contribute to transnational ethnic studies as it critically reflects upon such discursive mediations by Chinese, Chinese Americans, and Asian Americans both in China and in America with respect to different conceptions of race and ethnicity, but it also calls on Asian American studies to broaden collaborations with other fields in American studies and East Asian studies, since it is the latter that has been responsible for producing much of the knowledge of ethnic and race relations in Asian countries. These kinds of collaborations, as Jin's own work demonstrates, help mark, and thus expand, the intellectual location of Asian American studies not by “a bounded body of knowledge,” but by “a series of provocations in the more established, nation-based fields” (p. 22).

Third, Jin's comparative study of U.S. and Chinese multiculturalisms takes its readers to the world of fictional narratives created by U.S., Chinese, and Chinese American authors. Jin's study of what she dubs “fiction of multiculturalism” (p. 29) illustrates how these narratives perform their respective enactments of “strategic doubling.” While critiquing what she calls “conciliatory multiculturalism,” which aims to contain ethno-racial tensions without addressing their underlying structural causes, they move to develop conceptual alternatives by recuperating histories of ethno-racial conflicts, by proposing new or different ways to promote national unity, and by imagining possible futures for both U.S. and Chinese multiculturalisms.

Specifically, Jin focuses on six authors—Clive Cussler and Jiang Rong in chapter 2, Alex Kuo in chapter 3, Zhang Chengzhi and Rabih Alameddine in chapter 4, and Yan Geling in chapter 5—whose studies comprise four chapters of her five-chapter monograph. As these fictional narratives traverse the spatial-temporal imaginaries, they each put themselves in dialogue with and put pressure on the popular, political, and critical discourses on the subject of ethnic and race relations in these two countries. They constitute what can be construed as a discursive continuum of pluralist universalism whereby different discourses cluster together and apart to mediate between national unity and minority demands for autonomy and equality and to “encapsulate and propel the process of becoming and transformation that is the multicultural nation” (p. 30).

Such a continuum, necessarily shifting and potentially expansive, becomes all the more so as particular national contexts, in their grappling with the global, form new alliances, develop new ways of mediation, and provide new imaginaries for the understanding of the inherent tensions, if not contradictions, of pluralist universalisms. In the process, I hope that more work will be directed toward how language practices or, to be more exact, translingual practices contribute to double critique—whereby more critical attention will be accorded to how different discursive resources merge, evolve, and circulate for new meaning and for new ways of mediation both within and beyond a given national context, and to how an ethos of reflexivity and accountability extends to this kind of comparative undertaking. I am more than confident that such work will emerge soon because, as Jin rightly notes in her conclusion, any comparative critique of this kind is necessarily collaborative and it therefore will soon beget or engender new responses, new critiques. I simply cannot wait for that to commence.