Chinese Ness

Reframing the conversations around race and identity, a talented photographer offers a prism through which to explore our modern era of cultural uncertainty.

Critiques the idea of a Chinese cultural identity and argues that such identities are instead determined by geopolitical and economic forces. Forget Chineseness provides a critical interpretation of not only discourses of Chinese identity—Chineseness—but also of how they have reflected differences between “Chinese” societies, such as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, Singapore, and communities overseas. Allen Chun asserts that while identity does have meaning in cultural, representational terms, it is more importantly a product of its embeddedness in specific entanglements of modernity, colonialism, nation-state formation, and globalization. By articulating these processes underlying institutional practices in relation to public mindsets, it is possible to explain various epistemic moments that form the basis for their sociopolitical transformation. From a broader perspective, this should have salient ramifications for prevailing discussions of identity politics. The concept of identity has not only been predicated on flawed notions of ethnicity and culture in the social sciences but it has also been acutely exacerbated by polarizing assumptions that drive our understanding of identity politics.

There have been few efforts to overcome the binary of China versus the West. The recent global political environment, with a deepening confrontation between China and the West, strengthens this binary image. Post-Chineseness boldly challenges the essentialized notion of Chineseness in existing scholarship through the revelation of the multiplicity and complexity of the uses of Chineseness by strategically conceived insiders, outsiders, and those in-between. Combining the fields of international relations, cultural politics, and intellectual history, Chih-yu Shih investigates how the global audience perceives (and essentializes) Chineseness. Shih engages with major Chinese international relations theories, investigates the works of sinologists in Hong Kong, Singapore, Pakistan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and other academics in East Asia, and explores individual scholars' life stories and academic careers to delineate how Chineseness is constantly negotiated and reproduced. Shih's theory of the "balance of relationships" expands the concept of Chineseness and effectively challenges existing theories of realism, liberalism, and conventional constructivism in international relations. The highly original delineation of multiple layers and diverse dimensions of "Chineseness" opens an intellectual channel between the social sciences and humanities in China studies.

DIVTransnational ethnic identity issues studied through an ethnography of Chinese American visits to Chinese villages organized under a program set up by the Chinese government./div

Mr. Wu the laundryman, the evil Fu Manchu, the sex maniac, the opium addict, the docile immigrant worker: These stereotypes applied to Chinese people stretch back to the Victorian era, yet resurface with regularity in today’s media. In China itself the way the Chinese perceive and project themselves and their ethnicity has evolved over recent years, with discordant and unofficial voices challenging normative ideas of Chinese identity. In order to understand the numerous ways of seeing and being Chinese, Chinas Unlimited analyzes Chinese literary and cultural texts, such as television soap serials, as well as popular cultural representations of the Chinese.

"How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. As the Portuguese administration prepared to transfer Macau to Chinese control, it mounted a campaign to convince the city’s residents, 95 percent of whom identified as Chinese, that they possessed a “unique cultural identity” that made them different from other Chinese, and that resulted from the existence of a Portuguese state on Chinese soil. This attempt sparked reflections on the meaning of Portuguese governance that challenged not only conventional definitions of sovereignty but also conventional notions of Chineseness as a subjectivity common to all Chinese people around the world. Various stories about sovereignty and Chineseness and their interrelationship were told in Macau in the 1990s. This book is about those stories and how they informed the lives of Macau residents in ways that allowed different relationships among sovereignty, subjectivity, and culture to become thinkable, while also providing a sense of why, at times, it may not be desirable to think them."

This book explores contested notions of "Chineseness" in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong during the Cold War, showing how competing ideas about "Chineseness" were an important ideological factor at play in the region. After providing an overview of the scholarship on "Chineseness" and "diaspora", the book sheds light on specific case studies, through the lens of the "Chinese cultural Cold War", from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. It provides detailed examples of competition for control of definitions of "Chineseness" by political or politically oriented forces of diverse kinds, and shows how such competition was played out in bookstores, cinemas, music halls, classrooms, and even sports clubs and places of worship across the region in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The book also demonstrates how the legacies of these Cold War contestations continue to influence debates about Chinese influence – and "Chineseness" – in Southeast Asia and the wider region today. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

As China rose to its position of global superpower, Chinese groups in the West watched with anticipation and trepidation. In this volume, international scholars examine how artists, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals from the Chinese diaspora represented this new China to global audiences. The chapters, often personal in nature, focus on the nexus between the political and economic rise of China and the cultural products this period produced, where new ideas of nation, identity, and diaspora were forged.

"Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World is the first book devoted to Sinophone Southeast Asian literature in the English-speaking world. Conceptually innovative and flawlessly written, this book makes an important contribution not only to the emergent and growing field of Sinophone studies, but also to Southeast Asian studies, Chinese studies, comparative literary studies, diaspora studies, and minority and multicultural studies. Anyone interested in questions of identity calibrated through such vectors as language, culture, history, geography, and nationality will find this book to be extremely valuable. This is an impressive accomplishment." - Professor Shu-mei Shih, University of California at Los Angeles "E. K. Tan has done magnificent work in rethinking literary and cultural politics in the context of Sinophone articulations. In Rethinking Chineseness he looks into sources drawn from the Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia, identifies indigenous and diasporic contestations, and teases out the radical elements in the contemporary debate about Chinese identities. Both historically engaged and theoretically provocative, Tan's book is a most important source for anyone interested in Chinese and Sinophone literary and cultural studies." - Professor David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "With his illuminating historical and theoretical mapping of the concepts, from Overseas Chinese to Chinese Diaspora, Chineseness to Sinophone, E.K. Tan has done a brilliant job in this highly challenging, interdisciplinary project by weaving together discourses in various academic fields and providing an integrated cross-referential discussion. His selection of works by Singaporean and Malaysian writers fills in glaring gaps and further contributes to the richness and complexities of the notion of Sinophone literature and culture. It is a definitive basic reference in this field." - Professor Quah Sy Ren, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

This book examines the complexity of Chineseness in China and the Chinese diaspora. Using critical sociolinguistic and discourse analytical approaches, the chapters reveal the power dynamics and ideologies underlying the varied ways Chineseness is performed, represented and contested. Together they highlight four perspectives on Chineseness: the multiplicity of Chineseness, aspirational Chineseness, chronotopes of Chineseness and the cultural politics of Chineseness. It is argued that Chineseness is best understood as an ideologically-constructed variable, the articulation of which is deeply embedded within the dynamics of neoliberal globalization, rising nationalism, persistent Western hegemony, and shifting global geopolitics.