Contesting Chineseness 1st ed.

Author

Additional Author(s)

• Chang-Yau, Hoon
• Ying-kit, Chan

Publisher

Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2021

Language

English

ISBN

9789813360969

Series

Asia in transition 14

Subject(s)

• CHINA
• NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, CHINESE

Notes

. .

Abstract

Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international relations that support or undermine different instances of Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic, fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and represent themselves vis-à-vis the local, regional, and global in their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular culture, and international relations.

Physical Dimension

Number of Page(s)

1 online resource (xix, 335 p.)

Dimension

-

Other Desc.

ill.

Summary / Review / Table of Content

1.Chineseness in Motion: The Historicity of Nation and Contingency of Ethnicity --
Part One: Historicizing the Construction of Chineseness --
2.Demonstrating the Chineseness in the Forbidden City: From the Qing Court to the People's Republic --
3.The Embodiments of Chinese Identity: An Investigation of "Ancestral Sacrifices" to the Yan Emperor and Yellow Emperor --
4.Negotiating Chineseness in the post-WW2 context of Singapore (1955-1965).5 --
Academic Diplomacy, the Convergence of Sino-Thai Intellectual Nationalisms and the Chinese of Thailand --
6.Workers as Human Power: Late-Qing Intellectual Discourse of Chineseness in the Stories of Chinese Labor in Latin America --
Part Two: Chineseness as a Social Construct --
7.Rethinking the Position of Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia --
8."We are Southeast Asian Chinese": The notion of 'Chineseness' among Chinese Bruneians --
9.Continuity and Change: The Dynamics of Chineseness in Indonesia --
10.Straightly Chinese: Censorship and Systemic Homophobia in Contemporary China --
Part Three: Constructing Chineseness in Popular Culture --
11.Negotiating Chineseness through English dialects in Crazy Rich Asians --
12.Language, identities and resistance: comparing two ethnic Chinese rappers from Malaysia and Singapore --
13.Xinyao Talentimes: Television Sinophone Mediascapes and the making of Chinese-Singaporean identities in the 1980s --
14.Becoming a Nanyang Style Artist in Postwar Singapore and Malaya: Georgette Chen's Drawing and Her Construction of Asian Themes --
15. Constructing and Interpreting Chineseness in Shaonu Manhua: An Ethnographic Study of the Production and the Consumption of Chinese Girls' Comics.

Exemplar(s)

#	Accession No.	Call Number	Location	Status
1.	00805/21	306.0951 Con	Online !	Available