Organizer and Chair: Lillian M. Li, Swarthmore College
Discussant: G. William Skinner, University of California, Davis
Reaching beyond a parochial China-centered worldview, the China and Inner Asia Council presents two panels that address the relationship between Asian studies and Asian American studies. The two have often been in dramatic tension with each other, with some preferring to draw clear institutional and intellectual boundaries and others advocating a natural alliance.
Yet neither Asian studies nor Asian American studies is static or monolithic. In the past decade, the paradigms, boundaries, and practitioners of Asian studies have shifted significantly. And Asian American studies, in its relatively short lifespan, has undergone dramatic changes. As the newcomer, Asian American studies can also offer new directions to Asian studies.
In these back-to-back panels, we bring together scholars from history, anthropology, ethnic studies and literature from different generations for an interdisciplinary conversation. We will discuss the usefulness and limitations of the unitary concepts that used to inform Asian studies and their alternatives: transnational instead of national histories; diasporic instead of sojourning or overseas communities; the intercultural processes of mediation instead of acculturation.
In Part One, we present four papers on the Chinese diaspora that complicate the integrity of the "Chinese nation" and "Chinese culture." In focusing on the global movements of "Chinese" people from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, these papers invite the audience to consider the production of "Chineseness" as historical and contested processes. Furthermore, once we depart from the China-at-the-center analytical perspective, the question of location becomes vital. Are these people immigrants or migrants? Are they sojourners or citizens? What constitutes home? Who defines the legal, cultural, and economic parameters of citizenship? How do we name the hybrid cultural forms that spring up in the in-between spaces?
Philip Kuhn, drawing from his current research on Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, raises questions about the "nation" as an unit of analysis. Madeline Hsu follows up in her study of the discursive processes that produced Taishan County in southern China as "qiaoxiang," home of emigrants to the U.S. In focusing on the transnational forces impinging on these local rural communities, she complicates the idea of the Chinese homeland as neatly bound and unambiguous in meaning. Evelyn Hu-Dehart, a Latin-Americanist by training, discusses less well-known processes of Chinese migration to the Americas since the sixteenth century. She raises questions about the conceptual tools with which diasporic communities have been studied. Adam McKeown continues with the discussion on paradigms by trying to name the intercultural processes that shaped "Chinese" communities in the U.S. in the past century. G. William Skinner discusses the papers from a comparative perspective by introducing diasporic theories developed from cases within and without the Chinese diaspora.
Madeline Y. Hsu, San Francisco State University
This essay examines shifts in the cultural identities and allegiances of Chinese by focusing on the impact of long-term migration to North America on Taishan County, Guangdong, an area that promotes itself as the "foremost of emigrant communities" (diyi qiaoxiang) and that was, until 1965, home to the majority of ethnic Chinese in the United States.
Beginning with the Gold Rush, generations of male migration to North America produced in Taishan a dependency on the money earned by exported laborers. Because overseas wages played such vital roles locally, I argue that culture and society in Taishan adapted to nurture relationships with men who were physically absent from the county and their families for extended and often indefinite periods of time. Through magazines targeting émigrés and changing ideas and practices of family, those who stayed behind sought to maintain the cohesion of their physically dispersed community by developing and propagating two core concepts: Taishan’s importance as guxiang (native place) or home and the indelibility of loyalty owed by huaqiao, their term for overseas Taishanese, to their qiaoxiang.
As changing realities of war, economic opportunity, and institutional racism altered the allegiances of emigrant Taishanese in pursuit of the best ways of making a living, establishing families, and supporting them well, so too did Taishanese definitions of community and loyalty to home. These transformations in the relationship between Taishan County and overseas Taishanese provide new insights into the discourses on transnationalism and the potential of ethnicity to unify Chinese overseas.
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, University of Colorado, Boulder
This paper will focus on the migration and settlement of Chinese in the Americas, with emphasis on the more neglected regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, from the 16th century to the present day. Comparisons will be made with the experiences of "overseas" Chinese in Southeast Asia. The presentation should also generate discussion of the comparative merits and distinctions of concepts such as "sojourner" and "overseas Chinese" (used in Asian Studies) and "diasporic" and "transnational," as well as "immigrant," "race," and "citizen" (used in Asian American studies and ethnic studies).
Adam McKeown, Swarthmore College
Chinese migrants created transnational families, businesses and associations that existed within global flows of goods, money, information and people. As such, the practice of Chinese migration is very difficult to describe within common analytical tropes like assimilation, transplantation and minority groups, which assume clear-cut crossing of borders and accept perspectives centered on bounded geographic territories.
This paper argues that Chinese migrant organizations, economic strategies and families should be understood as concrete links across a geographic range that includes villages, Chinese cities, Hong Kong, overseas communities, and global political and economic systems. Adaptation in any single location was a particular manifestation of ideas, people and objects that were constantly circulating and being recycled through different social configurations.
The paper also argues that Chinese religious practices concerning the relationship between men and ghosts, and the roles of efficacious mediators provide models for intercultural relations that are more appropriate to Chinese migrant networks than tropes of acculturation or diffusion. They provided precedents for effective intercultural relations that were based on the maintenance of strong and insular networks and associations. A careful look at the transnational history of Chinese migrants, and the ways they both subverted and cooperated with global political and economic systems based on a patchwork of nation-states can help develop a deeper historical and cultural dimension to the contemporary interest in globalization.