Ying-kit Chan

Hannah Ming Yit Ho

This open access book presents Southeast Asia as an interesting and conceptually meaningful site to interrogate the transnational paradigm. In featuring research from and across different nations in Southeast Asia, it asks in what ways Southeast Asia lends itself to nuanced applications of transnationalism, and what the wider cultural and collective implications of that might be. Instead of viewing the past and the present as oppositional concepts of time, a temporal continuum is applied to a time-space compression that is fundamental to the workings of the transnational paradigm in the region that we call Southeast Asia. The transnational paradigm, a conceptual tool encompassing various configurations of transnationalism across disciplines, becomes relevant for analysing global cultural flows, but not without due consideration of the nuances shaped by spatio-temporal trends. A paradigm shift in transnationalism from historical connections to contemporary connectivity is afforded by increased mobility and accelerated cultural flows, which have given rise to unprecedented economic productivity in the past century and digital connectivity in the new millennium – a shift that the chapters collectively explore. Relevant to advanced students and scholars across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, focused on Southeast Asia, this book is a timely exploration that unpicks and unpacks this long-discussed aspect within Asian ‘area studies’.

Communities, Contestations and Cultures

Transnational Southeast Asia

Chang-Yau Hoon

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. “The Chinese overseas often saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has ever been what it seems.” Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore. “By including reflections on constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept, while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century.” Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University.

Ying-kit Chan

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