Description

China Abroad

Travels, Subjects, Spaces

Edited by Elaine Yee Lin Ho and Julia Kuehn
With a Foreword by Rey Chow

  • Published: May 2009
  • Subject Listing: Literature, Cultural Studies
  • Bibliographic information: 304 pp., 6 x 9 in.
  • Territorial rights: North American rights only
  • Distributed for: Hong Kong University Press
  • Contents

China Abroad is a pioneering work which brings together accounts of the journeys and cross-cultural experiences of Chinese travelers in the late nineteenth century with those of recent migrants and diasporic Chinese subjects. The book seeks to address how movements across cultures shape the different ways in which China and Chineseness have been imagined and represented since the beginning of the last century, offering an overview of the debate about Chineseness as it has emerged in different global locations.

Through a variety of primary sources in different media, essays discuss different approaches to the nation-diaspora paradigm. Set against the representations of this paradigm is the broader backdrop of the history of an "abroad" shaped by the actual encounter between Chinese and non-Chinese forces, by the transplantation of people, money, labor, and ideas, by frustration and exploitation, and by the ever present attempt to transcend a hierarchy of unequal ethnicities, cultures, and languages to full participatory, polyphonic equality. The collection coheres through its focus on the common interest in "China abroad" but it is also of particular interest through the variety of critical approaches it adopts. It will be of interest to literary and cultural studies scholars, historians, and sociologists with an interest in twentieth-century and current cross-cultural issues and, specifically, China-West studies.

Elaine Yee Lin Ho is associate professor of English and Julia Kuehn is assistant professor of English, both at the University of Hong Kong.

"The sheer diversity and heterogeneity of 'Chineseness' presented here functions as a conscientious corrective to the contemporary revival of Confucianism as the spirit of East Asian capitalism." - Pheng Cheah, University of California at Berkeley.

"China Abroad has two remarkable strengths. First, it rethinks the formation and territorialization of the Chinese diaspora, in all its complexities and differences. Second, it resituates debates about nation and diaspora to show their close interdependence. These two analyses make the book both innovative and compelling." - Robert J. C. Young, New York University
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