In the last two decades, Chinese transnationalism has become a distinctive domain within the new "flexible" capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. Ungrounded Empires maps this domain as the intersection of cultural politics and global capitalism, drawing on recent ethnographic research to critique the impact of late capitalism's institutions--flexibility, travel, subcontracting, multiculturalism, and mass media--upon transnational Chinese subjectives. Interweaving anthropology and cultural studies with interpretive political economy, these essays offer a wide range of perspectives on "overseas Chinese" and their unique location in the global arena.

This book addresses the historical and contemporary involvement of Chinese Americans from diverse walks of life in U.S.-China relations. The contributors present new evidence and fresh perspectives on familiar and unfamiliar national and transnational networks - including families, businesspersons, community newspapers, students, lobbyists, philanthropists, and scientists - and consider the likely future impact of such contacts on the most important bilateral relationship at the start of the new millennium. The volume makes a multidisciplinary contribution to understanding the extensive and vital roles and promise of Chinese Americans at this critical juncture in U.S.-China relations, and to revealing the importance of migrants as actors in contemporary global politics. The assessments shared by the contributors suggest that the nature and scope of the Chinese American involvement, particularly in global civil society networks, increasingly will determine the outcome of state-to-state relations between the United States and the PRC.

The first Okinawan immigrants arrived in Honolulu in January 1900 to work as contract laborers on Hawai'i's sugar plantations. Over time Okinawans would continue migrating east to the continental U.S., Canada, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Cuba, Paraguay, New Caledonia, and the islands of Micronesia. The essays in this volume commemorate these diasporic experiences within the geopolitical context of East Asia. Using primary sources and oral history, individual contributors examine how Okinawan identity was constructed in the various countries to which Okinawans migrated, and how their experiences were shaped by the Japanese nation-building project and by globalization. Essays explore the return to Okinawan sovereignty, or what Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzaburo called an "impossible possibility," and the role of the Okinawan labor diaspora in Japan's imperial expansion into the Philippines and Micronesia. Contributors: Arakaki Makoto, Robert K. Arakaki, Hokama Shuzen, Edith M. Kaneshiro, Ronald Y. Nakasone, Nomura Koya, Shirota Chika, Tomiyama Ichiro, Wesley Ueunten.

This book examines contemporary Chinese transnational mobile practices with special focuses on the ethnographic exploration of the lives, experiences, views, and narratives of the Chinese mobile subjects in three ASEAN countries: Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, and their interactions with the ethnic Chinese communities in these countries. This book is based on recent and updated original ethnographic research carried out by leading scholars in China and Southeast Asia. The work addresses questions of integration and social embeddedness, interrogating the possibility of whether the transnational Chinese diaspora can be simultaneously embedded into two or more nation-states and geopolitical spheres. It contends that in moving in the transnational space, the Chinese diaspora may experience a strong yearning for a cultural home that may not be in one space for bicultural or multicultural diaspora. It also asks whether the transnational Chinese diaspora is motivated to negotiate cultural membership and social belonging in a new country. Shedding new light on the ways in which the transnational diaspora negotiates cultural membership to adapt to situational requirements, this volume is relevant to scholars researching in China studies, anthropology, international relations, and in Asian, Southeast and East Asian regional studies.

Bringing together historians, sociologists, and political scientists, this volume documents persistent prejudices against consistently marginal groups in China, and the moral claims they have mustered in response.

Beyond Dichotomies examines literary texts, cultural production, and concrete local practices within the context of modernity and globalization by focusing on the ways in which some societies confront the complexity of cultures reflected in new forms of knowledge, narratives, and subjectivities. The contributors explore how particular societies negotiate the relations between the global and the local, and use a geographical, comparative perspective combined with an interdisciplinary approach to offer a diversity of views and illuminate the cultural impact of globalization on different societies around the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. These societies face complex questions regarding people's histories, identities, and cultures that embody the ambivalence, contradictions, and anxieties generated by the process of globalization. The contributors provide a compelling conclusion for a rethinking and reconfiguration of cultures and intercultural relations in today's global world in which dichotomized representations coexist with a discourse of globalization.

The essays in this collection address questions raised by a modernity that has become global with the victory of capitalism over its competitors in the late twentieth century. Rather than erase difference by converting all to European-American norms of modernity, capitalist modernity as it has gone global has empowered societies once condemned to imprisonment in premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity, on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization. Global modernity appears presently not as global homogeneity, but as a site of conflict between forces of homogenization and heterogenization within and between nations. Prominent in this context are conflicts over different ways of knowing and organizing the world. The essays here, dealing for the most part with education in the United States, engage in critiques of hegemonic ways of knowing and critically evaluate counterhegemonic voices for change that are heard from a broad spectrum of social, ethnic, and indigenous perspectives. Crucial to the essays' critique of hegemony in contemporary pedagogy is an effort shared by the contributors, distinguished scholars in their various fields, to overcome area and/or disciplinary boundaries and take the wholeness of everyday life as their point of departure.

DIVA successor to FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP, focusing on the meanings of citizenship to different classes of immigrants and transnational subjects./div

This anthology of autobiographical essays reveals the human side of the Chinese diaspora. Written by ethnic Chinese who were born outside of China, these moving pieces describe the experience of growing up a visible minority and the subsequent journey each author made home.