Divided into two parts – the first a combination of historical introduction and theoretical analysis, the second consisting of comprehensive, in-depth, detailed close readings of representative literary works – this book is a unique bridge connecting the fields of Comparative Literature, Asian American Studies, and Asian Studies. Through a repositioning of the Chinese component of Asian America in relation to the transformations of Chinese identity in modern times, it reads Asian American literature and Asian American literary studies in the context of the historical events and geopolitical changes that have informed the construction of “Chineseness”.Drawing on feminist theory, philosophy, narratology, and semiotics, the book focuses on the body as a point of interchange between collectivity and individuality, race and culture, matter and discourse. The body, as argued here, symbolically and narratively reflects, in the texts, the encounter between Chineseness and Americanness, revealing it as a matter germane to the construction of American multiculturalism, but simultaneously informed by the broader politics of the Chinese diaspora.This book historicizes Chineseness from an ex-centric perspective, thus contributing to the understanding of its present, and re-focalizes Asian American literature from a non-US perspective, thus exploring the Asian American field with a comparative outlook. Overall, this work illuminates an aspect of the topical, and inevitably contemporary, dialogue of two major Pacific superpowers, the US and China.

Modern nation states do not constitute closed entities. This is true especially in Southeast Asia, where Chinese migrants have continued to make their new homes over a long period of time, resulting in many different ethnic groups co-existing in new nation states. Focusing on the consequences of migration, and cultural contact between the various ethnic groups, this book describes and analyses the nature of ethnic identity and state of ethnic relations, both historically and in the present day, in multi-ethnic, pluralistic nation states in Southeast Asia. Drawing on extensive primary fieldwork in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines, the book examines the mediations, and transformation of ethnic identity and the social incorporation, tensions and conflicts and the construction of new social worlds resulting from cultural contact among different ethnic groups.

Highlighting the geopolitical and economic circumstances that have prompted migration from Hong Kong and mainland China to Canada, The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities examines the Chinese Canadian community as a simultaneously transcultural, transnational, and domestic social and cultural formation. Essays in this volume argue that Chinese Canadians, a population that has produced significant cultural imprints on Canadian society, must create and constantly redefine their identities as manifested in social science, literary, and historical spheres. These perpetual negotiations reflect social and cultural ideologies and practices and demonstrate Chinese Canadians' recreations of their self-perception, self-expression, and self-projection in relation to others. Contextualized within larger debates on multicultural society and specific Chinese Canadian cultural experiences, this book considers diverse cultural presentations of literary expression, the “model minority” and the influence of gender and profession on success and failure, the gendered dynamics of migration and the growth of transnational (“astronaut”) families in the 1980s, and inter-ethnic boundary crossing. Taking an innovative approach to the ways in which Chinese Canadians adapt to and construct the Canadian multicultural mosaic, The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities explores various patterns of Chinese cultural interchanges in Canada and how they intertwine with the community's sense of disengagement and belonging. Contributors include Lily Cho (York), Elena Chou (York), Eric Fong (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Loretta Ho (Toronto), Jack Leong (Toronto), Jessica Tsui-yan Li (York), Lucia Lo (York), Guida Man (York), Kwok-kan Tam (Hang Seng Management College), Eleanor Ty (Wilfrid Laurier), and Henry Yu (British Columbia).

Poised between the land and the sea, enabling the dynamic flow of people and goods, while also figuratively representing a safe place of rest and refuge, the harbor constitutes a liminal, ambivalent space par excellence that has been central to the American imagination and history since the early colonial days. From the mythical tales of discovery and foundation to the endless flows of migrants, through the dark pages of the slave trade and the imperialistic dream of an ever-expanding nation, harbors, both as a trope and as physical spaces, powerfully signify the American experience. Today, at a time when ideas of border protection and policing gain political prominence in the U.S. and elsewhere, harbors and the constellation of meanings they subsume have become an even more crucial object of critical inquiry. In this volume, thirty-two American Studies scholars from around the world interrogate the manifold significance of ports and of the exchanges they enable or restrain, casting a decentered look onto the complex positioning of the United States in its political, ideological, and cultural relationships with the rest of the world. This collection thus offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary investigation of the U.S.A., engaging the most recent trends in American Studies and actively participating in the international and transnational reconfiguration of the field.

The nine papers collected in this volume examine recent trends in language use in mainland China, and the associated social, economic, political, and cultural manifestations.

Aims to unpack the complex meanings of 'Chineseness' in post-1998 Indonesia, including the ways in which the policy of multiculturalism enabled such a 'resurgence', the forces that shaped it and the possibilities for 'resinicisation'. This book examines ethnic Chinese self-identify.

This book explores the role of Chineseness or lo chino in the production of Chilean national identity. It does so by discussing the many voices, images, and intentions of diverse actors who contribute to stereotyping or problematizing Chineseness in Chile. The authors argue that in general, representing and perceiving China or Chineseness as the Other is part of a broader cultural and political strategy for various stakeholders to articulate Chile as either a Western country or one that is becoming-Western. The authors trace the evolution of the symbolic role that China and Chineseness play in defining racial, gendered, and class aspects of Chilean national social imaginary. In doing so, they challenge a common idea that Chineseness is a stable signifier and the simplistic perception of the ethnic Chinese as the unassimilable foreigner within the nation. In response, the authors call for a postmigrant approach to understanding identities and Chilean society beyond stubborn Orient-Occident and us-them dichotomies.

Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. At a time of such uncertainty and confusion, with human rights currently being violated all over the world, a new and sustained examination of cultural responses to such issues is warranted. In this respect music, which is always produced in a social context, is an extremely useful medium; in its immediacy music has a potency of expression whose reach is long and wide. Contributors to this significant volume cover artists and topics such as Billy Bragg, punk, Fun-da-Mental, Willie King and the Liberators, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the Anti-Death Penalty movement, benefit concerts, benefit albums, Gil Scott-Heron, Bruce Springsteen, Wounded Knee and Native American political resistance, Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, as well as human rights in relation to feminism. A second volume covers World Music.

Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination, and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. In Eastern Europe, where states often tried to control music, the hundreds of thousands of Estonians who gathered in Tallinn between 1987 and 1991 are a part of the ""singing revolutions"" that encouraged a sense of national consciousness, which had years earlier been crushed when Soviet policy.