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Organizer: Laichen Sun, National University of Singapore
Chair: John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California
Discussant: Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Keywords: Yunnan, China, Southeast Asia, architecture, migration, Silk Road, world system, trade, frontier.
Historical research has just started to break modern political and academic boundaries over the past several years, but many more studies need to be undertaken. The historical and cultural identity of Yunnan is an ideal and exciting case in point. This involves primarily Yunnan’s relationship with "East Asia" ("China") and "Southeast Asia," or the question: Did (Does) Yunnan, a province of modern China, belong to China or Southeast Asia, historically and culturally? First, on the side of China, in the official and nationalistic Chinese scholarship, Yunnan has been portrayed as a part of China since the earliest times. This is certainly a Sino-centric view. Second, on the side of Southeast Asia, while anthropologists, including especially linguists, have treated Yunnan as "Southeast Asian," historians and political scientists tend to exclude Yunnan. The goal of this panel is to reinforce the "Yunnan as Southeast Asia" approach and to define a "Greater Southeast Asia."
The four papers support the main theme "Yunnan as Southeast Asia" from different perspectives and by dealing with different chronological periods. H. Parker James’ paper "Language, Migration, and House Type in Southeast Asia and Beyond" argues that the stilt house, a typical architectural style of Southeast Asian peoples, originated from Yunnan and spread to modern Southeast Asia as a result of migration in prehistoric times. Bin Yang’s paper "The Southwest Silk Road: Yunnan in a Global Perspective" contends that Yunnan should be seen as a part of the broader region of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean until the very "modern" period. Sun Laichen’s paper "Nanzhou and Dali Kingdoms from a Southeast Asian Perspective" shows that Yunnan maintained closer ties with Burma (Southeast Asia) rather than China proper during the seventeenth century. David A. Bello’s presentation "Charting the Wild Frontier inside Southwestern Yunnan" demonstrates that even as late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the "wild frontier zones" within Yunnan still remained free of Chinese control. Thus the "Southeast Asian" features and connections of "Yunnan" emerge from the discussions of the four papers.
The current panel fits the "Border-Crossing" category well due to its boundary-breaking (or redrawing) approach and content as well as the diverse academic background (China, Southeast Asia, world history) of the presenters, chair, and discussant.
Language, Migration, and House Type in Southeast Asia and Beyond
H. Parker James, Northeastern University
Architecture is largely overlooked as a source of evidence in historical discourse. Yet architectural evidence has much to contribute, especially when seen as an aspect of a culture’s technology and material culture. This paper will demonstrate the utility architectural evidence in historical inquiry evidence. It presents the land-based stilt house as a manifestation of "Austric" culture. The stilt house is the nearly ubiquitous rural house type among Austric speakers in both mainland and island Southeast Asia. Even in places like Java, Bali and Vietnam where Austric speakers now build ground-built houses, there is ample archaeological evidence that their ancestors built stilt houses in earlier times. This lends support to the so-called "Austric-hypothesis," a theory that contends that the mainland speakers of Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai languages share a common origin with the mainly island-dwelling speakers of Austronesian languages. The absence of the stilt house among many aboriginal peoples in Southeast Asia and Oceania supports my contention that the stilt house is not indigenous to the region but migrated there as part of the Austric cultural heritage. If we accept the stilt house as a definitive Austric house-type, it can contribute to the search for an Austric "homeland" in Yunnan. The region of Yunnan, where the headwaters of the Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong, and Yangtze rivers flow in close proximity, is a likely candidate for an Austric homeland. Archaeologists should search this area for stilt house post holes as evidence of early Austric occupation.
The Southwest Silk Road: Yunnan in a Global Perspective
Bin Yang, Northeastern University
This paper is going to present a systematic introduction to the Southwest Silk Road, a less known Silk Road in Western scholarship that had connected Southwest China, Southeast Asia, India and beyond through Yunnan for over two thousand years. While synthesizing Chinese scholarship, I supplement Chinese scholars with non-Chinese resources that, though somewhat discrete and indirectly, would help construct a more comprehensive picture of the Road. While providing geographical and historical maps I argue that this Road and its international trade had shaped Southwest China, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and South Asia. Furthermore, within a communication and trade network, the three Silk Roads had complementary roles for each other. Finally, the application of a world-system perspective will yield some theoretical explorations of the global role of Yunnan.
My global approach to Yunnan and its cross-regional trade will, in the first place, add new dimensions to our understanding of Old World. Moreover, such an approach severely challenges the dominant Sino-centric myth that Yunnan has been a part of China since ancient times (ziguyilai). As a matter of fact, the long-term transition of Yunnan cannot be accounted for until it is fit into its own world system characterized by the Southwest Silk Road. Finally, my primary study suggests that the emergence of modern Yunnan coincides with the formation of modern states in mainland Southeast Asia. Therefore, it is the borderlands such as Yunnan that contribute to metalanguages such as Southeast Asia, East Asia, and South Asia.
Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms from a Southeast Asian Perspective
Laichen Sun, National University of Singapore
National and nationalistic history follows modern political boundaries which act as solid walls separating scholars on the two or more sides. The research on Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms is a perfect example. The kingdoms lasted from the seventh to thirteenth centuries in modern Yunnan and was incorporated into the Chinese empire by the Mongols from 1253. Chinese and China scholars have long studied Nanzhao and Dali from a Chinese point of view by treating it as a local regime of the Chinese empire and stressing its Chineseness and Chinese connections. On the other hand, Southeast Asia scholars, especially historians, have rarely endeavored to study Nanzhao and Dali as they are beyond modern political boundary of Southeast Asia. As a result, Nanzhao and Dali have become Chinese "academic territory." This paper breaks this boundary between China and Southeast Asia by looking at Nanzhao and Dali from a Southeast Asian perspective. It argues that despite the fact that Nanzhao and Dali received heavy Chinese influences they were not "Chinese," but "Southeast Asian" in several fundamental ways, such as ecology, governmental and social organization, agriculture (rice dominated economy), currency (cowries), nature of warfare (slave-raiding), religious beliefs, languages, status of women, social custom (including betel chewing), architecture style, and so on. Especially, the multi-ethnic groups who lived under the rule of Nanzhao and Dali even today still maintain their distinctive Southeast Asian ways of life. Therefore, this research makes a plea for examining the history and culture of Nanzhao and Dali in the light of Southeast Asia, for comparing it with Vietnam, whose academic and cultural identity has been contested between scholars of "East Asia" and "Southeast Asia," and ultimately, for defining a "Greater Southeast Asia."
Charting the Wild Frontier Inside Southwestern Yunnan
David Bello, Southern Connecticut State University
The paper is an exploration of a new dimension of ethnic territory and its effect on conventional administrative space in Yunnan during the 18th and 19th centuries. Aspects of the local histories of the southwestern Yunnanese prefectures of Yongchang and Shunning reveal the existence of an interior frontier demarcating areas of tribal habitation totally beyond both the regular sub-provincial Qing administration (junxian) and its apparatus of indirect rule, the native chieftain system. This "wild" (ye) frontier constituted an administrative vacuum between incorporated or semi-incorporated areas of southwestern "Yunnan proper" (neidi) and large sections of the province’s border with Burma. Moreover, the wild frontier proved to be a formidable obstacle to efforts by local officials to assert control over their jurisdictions.
The first section of the paper will define the nature of this wild frontier and delineate it across Yongchang and Shunning prefectures. The material presented in this section is intended to modify the official representation of these prefectures by showing that the actual geographical extent of the local Qing administration, and consequently that of Yunnan Province itself, was considerably less than the lines on prefectural, provincial and imperial maps suggest. The second section of the paper will explore the consequences of the wild frontier zones’ geographic limitation of prefectural, and ultimately provincial, administrative control, and it will show that many of the problems faced by the administrations of these prefectures were rooted in their inability to either incorporate or isolate wild frontier zones. The third section of the paper will briefly attempt to extrapolate findings from my redrawing of the administrative map of southwestern Yunnan to other areas of the province and to its neighbors Guizhou and Sichuan.
Organizer and Chair: Li Zeng, University of Louisville
Discussant: Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis
Keywords: displacement, ethnic identity, cultural periphery, Asian migrants.
Geopolitical dislocation/displacement and its social and cultural consequences represented in literary writings by authors from China and the USA or recorded in archival data and personal memories of Indian/Chinese migrants in America and Russia are the concern of this panel session. Four panelists, specialized in such areas as China and Inner Asia, South Asia, and Asian American Studies, present here their scholarship on how different types of geopolitical dislocation/displacement have been treated by writers and made notable impacts on subjectivity: Xueqing Xu (from Canada) contrasts the very recent fictional treatment of dislocated ("sent-down") students during the Cultural Revolution with that of similar exilic living by authors of the 1980s; Li Zeng (from the U.S.) focuses on the problematic of re/presenting true Chinese Americans in the fictional world of Maxine Hong Kingston; Meeta Mehrotra (from the U.S.), through in-depth interviews, examines the formation of the ethnic identity of first-generation Indian immigrants in the United States; and Vladimir Boyko (from Russia) reconstructs the history of the marginalized Chinese diaspora in Asiatic Russia.
Of the phenomena of dislocation/displacement under discussion, the Chinese and/or Indian diasporic existence in America has been a spectacle in post-colonial world communities, whereas the "sent-down" movement of intellectual youths during the Cultural Revolution has left deep scars in modern Chinese history. Juxtaposing these and other types of exilic and diasporic experiences in our panel’s interdisciplinary discussion, we attempt to stimulate critical thinking and invite social and aesthetic interpretations in larger, cross-cultural/transnational contexts. For example, if any of these dislocated/ displaced experiences, whether voluntary or involuntary, national or transnational, are perceived in comparison with others, they can be seen as a universal exiled mode of existence which, as Edward Said generalized, inherently contains "an unexpected, unwelcome loss" (Culture and Imperialism, 336).
Fictional Treatments of Dislocation during the Cultural Revolution
Xueqing Xu, York University, Canada
The nightmare experience of China’s intellectuals and students during the "Cultural Revolution" (1966–76) has been the subject of much fictional writing since. My essay will show how the fictional treatment of what has been called the Chinese holocaust changed dramatically after the immediate response of the earlier writers of the 1980s.
Earlier writers tended to explore the experience in the form Jameson called "allegory," as for instance in Zhang Yianliang’s novella Half a Man Is a Woman (1985). There the loss of the protagonist’s sexual capacity while working in a labor camp reflects the political castration of the whole country.
By contrast, writers of the nineties presented the absurdity of attempting to reeducate the students by dislocating them in the countryside. My paper will focus on Wang Xiaobo’s novel The Golden Time (1997) to exemplify how the author uproots the utopian fantasy of "reeducation" in the form of parody. Different from the widespread exposure of the victims’ personal trauma in Zhiqing wenxue (Literature of Intellectual Students), Wang playfully deflates the Maoist political hegemony by the use of irony: the attempt to crush all sexual desire results in sadistic and masochistic aggression, and to collectivize students results in a resurgence of individualism. Thus, my paper asserts that Wang’s novel serves as an example of subversion of Jameson’s myth of national allegory.
Tripmaster Monkey: A Journey to the True Meaning of "Chinese American"
Li Zeng, University of Louisville
In the United States, the past three decades have witnessed the appearance of a large number of fictional works produced by Chinese American writers. While depicting ethnic malaise suffered by Chinese migrants in their adopted land, most of these authors explore the problematic of their younger generations’ dealing with a dual cultural heritage. Focusing on her novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, my paper attempts to show how Maxine Hong Kingston searches for a diasporic identity for her protagonist/characters and herself.
As part of post-modernist literature, Tripmaster Monkey emphasizes all that is peripheral to the American mainstream. Moreover, Kingston, the narrator of the novel, and Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist, deconstruct the preconception of the Chinese diaspora in America, subverting the socially constructed stereotypical identity of Chinese Americans. Consequently, in probing the concept of ethnic dilemma and transforming the identities of Chinese Americans, as my paper sees, the author of the novel and its protagonist have engaged in an ambitious project different from the so-called model minority discourse which "most often takes its own illness as a given, implacable part of its inherent nature, and retreats inward to diagnose itself" (D. Palumbo-Liu).
"Triple Outsiders": Ethnic Identity and the Exper-iences of First-Generation Indian Immigrants in the United States
Meeta Mehrotra, Roanoke College
Migration from one culture to another, where they become a racial/ethnic minority, makes ethnic identity salient for the migrants. The social constructionist perspective in sociology views identity as not something we have, but something we "do" or perform in our everyday interactions through identity work, the wide range of activities—verbal and nonverbal, such as dress and personal appearance, affiliation with others—that indicate to others who we are. This paper examines the meanings that first-generation Asian Indians immigrants to the United States attach to their Indian identity through their identity work. Using in-depth interviews with thirty first-generation immigrant Indian men and women, the author explores gender similarities and differences in identity work and in the process of adaptation to the United States. The author addresses the following questions: What does being an Indian mean for women and men? What aspects of their culture do they seek to uphold? Do all cultural elements have the same importance for women and men? The paper thus helps us go beyond the prevailing gender-neutral pluralistic advocacy of diversity and its assumption that immigrants simply retain their culture in a new context, by looking at how decisions about what elements to retain are made, and also, importantly, how these decisions vary by gender.
Chinese in Asiatic Russia: Between Geopolitics and Fortune
Vladimir Boyko, Barnaul State Pedagogical University, Russia
This paper aims to explore the origins and socio-cultural dimensions of Chinese communities in Asiatic Russia. Historically, the massive Chinese migration to the Russian borderland/heartland is seen as one of the consequences of geopolitical and geoeconomical upheavals at the turn of the 20th century; during and after WWI, a significant number of Chinese immigrants appeared in spacious regions of Asiatic Russia partially due to the need for war project workers.
For political reasons, such as the Stalinist purges, for many years the diasporic Chinese in Russia either became invisible or dissolved into the multi-national diversity of the Russian Asian borderland. Yet, based on archives, such as stories, private papers, and correspondence with relatives/compatriots found in former KGB files, we know that the Chinese communities, on the one hand, experienced discrimination in the economic and political spaces of Russian Asiatic frontier, and, on the other, eventually integrated into the host society economically as well as demographically by combining some external forms of the Soviet system with their own national traditional norms and customs. With a population numbering roughly 500,000, the Chinese diaspora in Asiatic Russia is now taking a more sound agenda and this deserves more interarea/interdisciplinary academic attention from both Russia and elsewhere.
Organizer: Satadru Sen, Washington University, St. Louis
Discussant: Ian Duffield, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
For large numbers of people around the world between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, colonialism was also an imperial experience, i.e., an experience of participation in a very wide political and geographic field, marked by migration and encounters with migrants. Because colonial empires typically encouraged movement—both physical and discursive—they tended to subvert the fixed identities that are central to the practice of colonialism as a system of domination. These subversions generated unexpected new opportunities for the relocated subject, new anxieties for those who observed migration, new strategies by which the stable and the dominant sought to contain the mobile, and new ways for the mobile to avoid or co-opt their containment. This panel investigates the migrant as the site of a productive tension between the colony and the empire.
The three papers deal with the fluid negotiations between mobile subjects and their observers in the world of imperial metropoles and colonies. In Changing "Home" from India to England within the early British Empire, Michael Fisher analyzes the process by which "home" was constructed for South Asian men and women who moved to Britain in the early nineteenth century and redefined themselves in conjunction with European sexual partners. In Imperial Manhood: Migrant Elites and Gender in the British-Indian Relationship, Satadru Sen examines the tension that marked the limits of masculine identity for the children of the Indian princes, who were educated by the British explicitly to play active roles in running the empire, and who frequently traveled to England from the 1870s onwards. In Manxmen, Blue-Noses, and Copper-Faces: Race and Identity on the Maritime Frontier, Isaac Land looks at the shifting boundaries of racial identity among colonial and metropolitan sailors between the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
Changing "Home" from India to England within the Early British Empire
Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College
Immigration from one culture to another has complex consequences for an individual and the people around her/him. As the British Empire expanded, various people from Asia emigrated to England. Their reasons for settling there differed, as did the consequences, depending on their gender and class, as well as current cultural constructions of "race" and ethnicity. Using unpublished source materials, this paper examines two immigrant families from India. Nur Begam, renamed Helene Bennett (c. 1770–1853), followed her consort, Benoit de Boigne (1751–1830), to England in 1797, along with their two children: Ali Bakhsh (1792–1853, baptized Charles Alexander) and Banu (1789–1804, baptized Anna). Mohammed Ibrahim (c. 1811–1855) came to Britain in 1833, supporting his family’s land claims, but he married an Anglo-Irish woman and settled there as a tobacconist. Using these case studies comparatively, we can trace how each of these people changed "home" within the context of the early British Empire.
Imperial Manhood: Migrant Elites and Gender in the British-Indian Relationship
Satadru Sen, Washington University, St. Louis
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the British view of educated Indian men became increasingly circumscribed by what Mrinalini Sinha has called "colonial masculinity," i.e., the binary opposition between the manly Englishman and the effeminate baboo. At the same time, colonial masculinity contained other categories, most prominently that of the "martial" Indian, who was manly precisely because he was subordinated within the political hierarchy of colonialism. By the 1870s, these Indians—specifically, the children of the Indian princes—were increasingly slated for a new education which included travel to England. While this experience was expected to create a class of modern, Anglicized and Anglophile allies for the empire, it is evident that it also opened a window which allowed the students to escape the constraints of colonial masculinity, and to develop subversive gender identities upon a wider imperial stage. This paper examines the problems that arose when the structures of cultural containment that surrounded the "martial" Indian failed, and argues that the gendering of the colonized male needs to be viewed in the context of possibilities and anxieties generated by the mobile nature of the imperial experience.
Manxmen, Blue-Noses, and Copper-Faces: Race and Identity on the Maritime Frontier
Isaac Land, Texas A&M University
The mercantile and naval exploits of the European powers in the Age of Sail would not have been possible without the contributions of non-Europeans, who made up a large percentage of the crews in many cases. Recent scholarship has illuminated the lives of African-American sailors (Bolster, Black Jacks; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra), lascar seamen from South Asia (Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes) and mariners from China (Tchen, New York before Chinatown) and the Pacific Islands (Chappell, Double Ghosts). Bolster, Linebaugh, and Rediker have focused in particular on the ways that shipboard life offered an egalitarian atmosphere that was unusually open to outsiders regardless of origin. My paper argues that the emergence of militant nationalisms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century challenged this egalitarian tradition, as certain British and North American sailors tried to construct a "white" identity for themselves that was built on the stigmatization of their "mongrel" or dark-skinned shipmates. I examine the attitudes of sailors in the transitional generation before these lines had hardened and identity was more likely to be rooted in a town or region than in either race or nation.
Organizer and Chair: Nobue Suzuki, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussants: Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh; Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Keywords: transnational migration, agency, power, Filipino women, East Asia.
Recent scholarship on Filipinas overseas has enriched our knowledge about Filipina domestic workers. Yet, little grounded work has been put forth regarding other Filipinas overseas, especially entertainers and wives of foreign men in Japan and South Korea. Consequently, these women’s experiences continue to largely remain "sexy," marketable tales, which tend to spin around particular, contradictory images of victims or perpetrators. In the end, these women become either, because of oppressive dictates of the patriarchal forces of the family, customers, husbands and the sending and receiving states.
Based on ethnographic research, this panel interrogates such widely consumed "sexy" stories about Filipina entertainers and wives (of Japanese men) in Japan and South Korea. The papers suggest some ways of understanding the possibilities and complexities opened up by contemporary migrations and the tensions and contradictions experienced by migrants themselves in the receiving society, through various transnational links and intermediaries, and in the global system generally.
Fujieda sets the legal contexts into which Filipina entertainers have entered and come under the discipline of the Japanese state. Cheng and Suzuki then explore the ways in which Filipina entertainers and wives in South Korea and Japan respectively (re)make and exert their agencies to creatively imagine social relations and engender self-knowledges that can intervene into social forces of transnational encounters. The papers as a whole demonstrate how such structural forces and individual experiences articulate with each other and also form a counterpoint to hegemonic narratives of sexed Filipina bodies in the transnational Asia Pacific.
Japan’s Internationalization of Gender: A Critical Analysis
Eri Fujieda, Sarah Lawrence College
More than two decades have passed since foreign women’s sex work in Japan was articulated as a transnational social problem. Today, foreign women in Japan are still discussed as a population that bears various problems. Central to such discussions is no longer related to their sex work, however. The dominant discourse appears to have shifted its focus to effective strategies to integrate foreign women to Japanese society through disciplining their gender relations in the private sphere. While this can be regarded as a positive change to make Japan a multiethnic society, gender relations presumed in this discourse are rather narrow. Specifically in the realm of laws and policies, gender relations imposed to legitimate foreign women’s settlement in Japan are rather normative and can easily silence the voices of those who work in Japan’s sex industry and who cannot afford such relations. This paper uncovers the disciplinary tendency in the discourse of foreign women in Japan through a critical feminist analysis of immigration control and naturalization policies for the last two decades, and explicates its implications, particularly in relation to the conditions of foreign women working in the sex industry in Japan.
Girl Power in the Clubs: Filipina Entertainers in U.S. Military Camp Towns in South Korea
Sea Ling Cheng, University of Hong Kong
Since 1996, Filipinas have migrated to Korea to work as entertainers in U.S. military camp towns in South Korea (kichich’on). Government regulations, media reports and NGO discourses effectively contain these women in their illegitimate identity as the "prostitute." This ethnography, however, situates these Filipinas’ agency as female labor migrants within the political economy of the Asia-Pacific. In particular, it examines the multivalence of their agency and action in the clubs that challenge on an everyday basis their inscription as objects of male desire.
Dislocation for these Filipinas is simultaneously oppressive and liberating—making them vulnerable in an alien land but also frees them from home conventions. In kichich’on clubs, the women actively deploy their sexed bodies as instruments of resistance in manners inconceivable back home. They simultaneously mobilize and subvert their eroticization as entertainers, displaying both an awareness of their status as objects and their powers beyond this objectified identity. Their practices have evolved within the specific subtleties of gender asymmetries in an interracial context, the capitalist relations of domination and exploitation, as well as their liminal status between Home and Exile.
This paper unravels the meanings of the women’s subversive practices in the clubs within structures of domination and their own projects of aspiration within a transnational context. By demonstrating the women’s cultural creativity in their struggle against the "prostitute" label, the paper argues for a recognition of the Filipinas as resourceful agents in the transnational field.
Inside the Home: Power and Negotiations in Filipina-Japanese Marriages
Nobue Suzuki, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussions of Filipinas’ transnational marriages to "first-world" men have often followed economic formulae of the men’s sexual subjection of the women within national, class, gender and moral hierarchies. Popular portrayals of the women have hastily parsed them into victim and perpetrator categories. More recently, increasing numbers of intermarried people in Japan have come to feel that their presences are consumed as cosmopolitan "events." By highlighting differences, common representations of intermarried people have worked to efface other important dimensions of their complex realities as well as the women’s agency and power in negotiating with their husbands and social forces.
Focusing on the politics of intimacy and the cultural logic of power in the Philippines, this paper ethnographically delineates the lives of Filipina wives and their Japanese husbands in order to examine the dynamics of transcultural marital relationships over time. The kind of power that Filipina wives exert is relational, in which both the powerful and the less powerful affect each other in their continuous endeavors to create a balance. By invoking the ideas and idioms of love, compassion, acceptance and subordination, the wives have developed ways in which they can influence their husbands, bring them closer to the women’s ideal gender and sexual relationships. Following the workings of relational power, the women in turn discipline themselves by performing Japanese gender roles. The paper will thus show the complex processes through which Filipina wives constantly make and remake potentially transformative relationships with their husbands.
Organizer and Chair: Ann Frechette, Hamilton College
Discussant: Susan Greenhalgh, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: adoption, China, families, orphanages, internationalism.
Over the past ten years, the number of children adopted from China has increased from only 200 per year to nearly 5,000 per year, most to the United States. This panel analyzes how intercountry adoption from China influences families and family life in China and the United States. It focuses on the family for a number of reasons: (1) Chinese families have been undergoing vast changes in the past two decades due to market reforms and the one-child policy. One goal of this panel is to situate intercountry adoptions in the context of these other social and economic transformations; (2) There has been much attention in the United States on the influence of new reproductive technologies on the family, yet the number of families created through intercountry adoption exceeds those created through assisted reproduction. A second goal of this panel is to understand how China-U.S. adoptions influence concepts of the family in the United States; and (3) China and the United States are often depicted as polar opposites in their approaches to families and family life, with China as a model of "familism" and the United States as a model of individualism. A third goal of this panel is to challenge the polarization of Chinese and American models of the family by analyzing a site through which they are negotiated. This panel has been placed under the border-crossing category due to its theme (migration, mobility) and the diversity in the background of the participants (anthropology, sociol-ogy, government, and educational development).
International Adoption and Chinese Orphanages
Frayda Cohen, University of Pittsburgh
The 1990s witnessed a sudden, dramatic increase in the number of adoptions of Chinese children by U.S. parents. As a result, since 1999, both the U.S. and Chinese governments have instituted new policies that regulate the ways in which families may be created across borders. This paper addresses the ways in which these global borders are negotiated in China at the local level by examining the ways in which the Western expatriate community interacts directly with orphanages and Chinese families. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Beijing and Tianjin (PRC), as well as recent scholarship concerned with the phenomena of transnationalism, globalization and modernization, this paper uses intercountry adoption as a vehicle to address these questions: (1) How do processes which mediate a global political economy influence conceptions of the family and family life? and (2) How are families, much like businesses, sites at which citizenry becomes flexible in order to maximize the possibilities of attaining what they perceive to be an "ideal" form? The paper discusses the relationship between the expatriate community of orphanage volunteers and adoptive and foster families, and the domestic adoption community consisting of orphanage staff, and adoptive and foster families. In contrast to simplistic popular characterizations of "Chinese" or "western" family types that are promoted by much of the adoption literature in the U.S., this project examines the construction of flexible cross-national families that ultimately contribute to the creation of a "third culture" (Featherstone, 1990; Ong and Nonini, 1997).
Chaobao: The Plight of Adoptive Families under the One Child Policy
Kay Ann Johnson, Hampshire College
In the 1990s, vigorous implementation of the one-child policy produced a dramatic rise in female infant abandonment in many parts of China. At the same time, domestic adoption was severely restricted in an effort to subordinate it to the one-child policy, limiting legal adoption to older or infertile childless people, creating, in effect, a one-child adoption policy. This undermined customary adoption practices and left even more children homeless. As orphanages became over-crowded the government turned to international adoption as a means to find homes for some of these children and obtain funds to help care for those that remained.
Although restrictions on adoption did not succeed in eliminating all domestic adoption practices that violated the one-child adoption policy, it did push these practices underground and out of official view. Furthermore the restrictions profoundly affected the formation of many adoptive families and the relationships among their members. This paper will explore the various ways restrictive government policies and practices have affected adoptive families that fall into the category of "overquota adoption," or "chaobao." In addition, efforts by some adoptive parents to organize and challenge the legal discrimination they face will be discussed. Finally, the paper will discuss the limited changes that have occurred in the wake of efforts to reform the adoption law in order to allow more adoption of abandoned children within China.
The Bi-cultural Socialization Hypothesis: Parental Commitments to Socializing Children Adopted from China to Their Birth Culture
Richard Tessler, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Even though Chinese culture is so different from the American birth culture of adoptive parents, many attempt to provide their children with Chinese and American socialization. Socialization to American culture is effortless. However, many parents choose to make the extra effort to provide their children with some knowledge of the Chinese heritage they left behind. The purpose of this paper is to examine changes over time in parents’ attitudes toward Chinese socialization, and the effects of these practices on the children adopted from China. We draw on questionnaires administered five years apart to a large sample of American parents with children adopted from China. Attitudes towards bi-cultural socialization were measured when the average age of the children was two years and again when the same children averaged seven years of age. At follow-up, we were able to assess how closely parents’ attitudes corresponded to their actual practices and also to explore their children’s cultural knowledge and inter-racial attitudes that may be revealing of self-attitudes. Linking data from schools and communities also enables us to examine some ethnic compositional effects over and above differences in parents’ attitudes and family structure. Further follow up assessment of these same children will be necessary in order to determine whether Chinese socialization will produce fewer identification problems when the children reach the teenage years, but preliminary results in middle-childhood are promising.
A Typical American Family? How Adoptive Families Acknowledge and Incorporate Chinese Cultural Heritage into Their Lives
Jay Rojewski, University of Georgia
When a child from China is adopted by U.S. parents, the adoptive family must address questions about if, when, how, and how much to acknowledge the birth cultural heritage of their child. This paper will address these concerns by presenting findings of a study that has examined ways families address the myriad issues surrounding cultural heritage. Drawing on work by H. David Kirk, D. M. Brodzinsky, and others, a conceptual framework will be presented first to aid in understanding the dynamics involved in emphasizing (or de-emphasizing) cultural heritage. Second, results of a web-based survey of two samples of adoptive families (nl=339 [from Rojewski and Rojewski, 2001], n2=80 [unpublished replication and extension of the first study]) that examined issues related to culture heritage will be examined. Specific findings will reveal the range of actions taken by adoptive parents on: (a) how families cope with family-child differences; (b) how families acknowledge the child’s birth culture and heritage (e.g., celebrating adoption-related events, acknowledging culturally-related events, having contact with other Chinese children and adults); and (c) the perceived benefits and importance of incorporating Chinese cultural heritage into family life. Results present a baseline for understanding the range of responses adoptive families have to address issues of Chinese heritage, as well as trends in the reasoning parents use when deciding about cultural heritage-related issues.
Sexuality, the Media, and Intercountry Adoption: Recent Changes in China-U.S. Adoption Policy
Ann Frechette, Hamilton College
Throughout the summer of 2000, John Hancock Insurance aired an ad depicting a female couple picking up their newly adopted Asian baby at an airport. The ad resonated with a number of audiences in the United States, but more importantly, it raised awareness among adoption officials in China about non-traditional families in the United States seeking to adopt Chinese children. In October of 2001, as a result, in part, of the publicity surrounding the ad, China put in place a new quota system and a series of new policies governing intercountry adoption. As part of its new policies, China began requiring single women who seek to adopt to declare that they are not homosexual. This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of China’s new adoption policies. It is based on field research within a China-U.S. adoption agency, interviews with prospective parents in the process of adopting from China, and Internet-based discussions about the Hancock ad. It focuses, in particular, on the ways in which the various participants in the China-U.S. adoption process conceptualize the family. It argues for an expansion of the analysis of the influence of the global media on foreign policy beyond the narrow limits of the "CNN effect" debate to include also the field of private international law, and in particular, to include the negotiation of the interpretation of families and family life.
Organizer: Savita Nair, Mount Holyoke College
Chair: Sucheta Mazumdar, Duke University
Discussants: Vinay Lal, UCLA; Edward Alpers, UCLA
Keywords: South Asia, Africa, diaspora, Indian Ocean, race, nationalism, identity, business.
This panel challenges the static view of South Asians as "in the middle" between Africans and Europeans in colonial East African society. By focusing on the economic and cultural relations and interactions between Europeans, South Asians and Africans, and its consequences for the "Asian" identity, Indian and African nationalism and concepts of "race" and business relations, the paper presenters seek to complicate general understandings about the South Asian presence in East Africa. Gijsbert Oonk’s paper shows how and why the culture of Gujurati businessmen changed as a result of these interactions in the period 1880–2000. James Brennan focuses on the "African" perspective of South Asian and African nationalism and colonial categorizations of race in 1930s Tanzania, whereas Savita Nair’s paper presents "Indian" perspectives of conflict, arbitration, and resolution between individuals in post-WWI Kenya. All papers are based on fresh archival research and oral histories. Presenters will situate their research by identifying epistemological and methodological questions which are behind the field of "South Asians in East Africa." Different angles of approach will allow questions about identity, nationalism, race, business, and empire to be explored more fully by co-discussants Vinay Lal and Edward Alpers, scholars of South Asian and African history, respectively. The panel will benefit further by the presence of its Chair, Sucheta Mazumdar, whose work on Chinese, Asian/Pacific, and Asian American history has been "crossing borders" from the beginning.
Shops and Stations: Negotiating Space and Politics in Colonial Kenya, 1918–1930
Savita Nair, Mount Holyoke College
Scholars generally accept the characterization of the "Asian middleman" in colonial East African society. While such descriptions not only erase fragmentation and perpetuate isolationist arguments about South Asian communities, it also assumes that the "middle" position coincides with particular privileges and associated identities. This paper aims to tease out the privileges, limitations, power plays, and identity politics of South Asians who were embroiled in the predicaments of local colonialism and global empire. While there existed multiple institutional frameworks under which South Asians in East Africa were situated (the ones which made them appear as "middlemen"), I shift the focus to the market towns, railway stations, small shops, and street corners of the British East African Protectorate in the years following World War I. It is within these local sites that most South Asians interacted with Africans and British on a daily and often mundane basis. I examine individual disputes, rather than collective movements, and analyze how actions were narrated, arbitrated, interpreted, and penalized in the courts. Consequently, notions of racial superiority, commercial culture, "civiliz-ational worth," and imperial rights are revealed. How South Asians encountered opposition to their own understandings of position, prestige, and power, and how they negotiated conflictual exchanges, provide ways to expand and better contextualize the standard story that has been written about them. Court cases, and the manner in which they were adjudicated, serve as a glimpse into personal interactions but also complicate the histories of migration and empire.
Continents, Civilizations, and Interracial Liaisons: Retracing Nationalist Thought among Gujaratis and Africans in Colonial Tanganyika, 1930–1960
James R. Brennan, Northwestern University
This paper examines how the contradiction between South Asian diasporic rhetoric of anti-colonialism and South Asian civilizational rhetoric of implicit racial hierarchy shaped East African political thought. Gujarati communities in Tanganyikan towns such as Dar es Salaam pursued vigorous anti-colonial politics grounded in a civilizational vision, be it "Asian," "Indian," "Brahmanical," or "Islamic," that rebuked Western civilization for disenfranchising Indians while failing to civilize or improve local Africans. The rigid endogamy practiced by most Gujarati communities and general commercial success distanced South Asian nationalists from local Africans, making the transmission of a civilization-based, anti-colonialism a difficult yet still central topic of debate in Tanganyika. The male-dominated discussion eventually turned on the control of women, with male African intellectuals arguing that the survival of an "African" civilization depended on African women’s fidelity to African men, and for African women to refuse to enter into concubinage with Gujarati or other non-African men. These sentiments were particularly strong among African soldiers recruited to fight in South Asia during the Second World War. By the early 1950s, a full-blown African civilizational rhetoric emerged as the basis of anti-colonial politics, marginalizing the formerly ascendant Gujarati communities in their local political roles. This case complicates how we understand the way in which South Asians in East Africa served as catalysts of anti-colonial nationalism. This case also argues that nationalist thought in East Africa was not simply derivative of Western models, but did retain and accept the pluralist vision that nations/races are continentally bound civilizations upon which polities should primarily be formed.
Characterizing the Changing Culture of an Asian Business Elite in East Africa, 1880–2000
G. Oonk, Erasmus University
In general, it is assumed that the East African society consisted of a pyramid model, where the small minority of Europeans were on top, the Asians in the middle and the majority of Africans at the bottom. Only in very rare instances was there a more intimate relation (love, marriage, and sex) between Europeans, Indians and Africans. All this would change at the eve of Independence in the 1960s. The Asians were forced to make up their minds and reinforce their relations with Africans and Europeans. Though the pyramid would not fall apart immediately, it was clear that its European colonial foundation would crumble. The focus of the present paper is the interaction of Lohana (Gujurati Hindu) businessmen with other Indian, European, and African communities in East Africa. The main aim of the paper is to show how and why the culture of Lohana businessmen changed as a result of these interactions during three generations: the pioneers (born between 1880–1920, who decided to settle with their families in East-Africa); the Asian East-Africans (born in Africa between 1920–60, who made East-Africa their home); and the internationalists (born in Africa and the West between 1960–2000, who have "roots" as Asian East-Africans, but are oriented towards the west). Among the key variables are: rituals and practices around birth, marriage and death; education (what and where) including the knowledge of Gujarati: and food and dress habits and the questions of citizenship. Whenever possible changes in these variables will be related to changing business habits like the role of the family trust in the family business, how to "entertain" business relations and, how to choose business partners.
Organizer and Chair: Eileen Rose Walsh, Yale University
Discussant: Margaret Byrne Swain, University of California, Davis
The border region between Southeast Asia and China has historically been an area of flows—flows of people (colonial explorers, soldiers, tourists, pilgrims, workers, smugglers), commodities, culture and capital. Overlaying histories of movement and control, tourism is sweeping across the cultural and national patchworks of this "peripheral" region, and draws on idealizations of a primitive, unspoiled "Other," whether human or nature. While offering the new hope for economic well-being, tourism opens borders through negotiating new forms of state control with shifting local power structures. Like other industries in much of this region, tourism is partially supervised by the state and is embedded in state projects of boundary expansion and knowledge production, cultural politics, and class tensions. In China’s southwestern Yunnan Province, and much of the "West" that China is now campaigning to "open," officials and planners expect tourism to bring wealth and "progress" to inhabitants, while helping to solidify state infrastructure and control. In Burma’s northeastern Shan State, which borders on Yunnan, tourism is part of state projects to economically develop, while expanding control over, contested ethnic minority regions. Within tourist communities, the new economies of service, marketing, and representation that develop through tourism often manipulate, create and rigidify gender hierarchies, ethnic divisions and class rivalries. In these local contexts, the changes that occur through opening to tourism mingle with desires for globalization and modernization. The papers in this panel explore some of the many questions surrounding tourism as development, including issues of history, imperialism and exploration, human rights, development, gender hierarchies, ethnic divisions, cultural transformation, commodification and consumption. This border-crossing panel focuses on Yunnan Province, China’s premier ethnic and eco-tourism destination, and on Shan State, Burma, as case studies within Southeast Asia, while situating issues within the local, provincial, national, and global spheres.
Captain Kingdon-Ward’s Gold Medals: Ontologies of Botanical Exploration in Southwest China, 1905–1945
Erik Mueggler, University of Michigan
At the turn of the century, British botanists discovered a "plant-hunting Mecca" in Southwest China. Spectacular new species of horticultural plants abounded; the climate was temperate, and many species were hardy in Britain. About a dozen botanical explorers mounted expeditions to the area. They collected and described thousands of species; hundreds were introduced into British gardens; more were cultivated in arboreta; thousands were preserved in herbaria. Botanical exploration and archiving were the key means through which the British envisioned this periphery of the Empire.
In this paper—a fragment of a larger project—I explore the practices of walking, seeing, and writing that lay at the heart of botanical exploration, focusing on a prolific explorer, Francis Kingdon-Ward. I examine the ways Kingdon-Ward worked through difficulties and contradictions posed by the realist ontology of botanical science as he explored Yunnan and Southern Tibet. Kingdon-Ward’s argument with his divorced wife over the ownership of gold medals granted him by the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Horticultural Society, and other Imperial institutions provides a window on some of the links between this contradictory realism, the crumbling gold standard in Britain, and the struggle to re-imagine the British Empire. This botanist’s efforts to maintain a particular representational relationship with the world he walked over, in the face of the deteriorating conditions of realist ontology, illuminates the ways the material practices of botanical exploration flowered into complex, contradictory visions of the place of this landscape on the margins of the British Empire.
Authenticity, Forgery, Counterfeit: Borderland Consumption in Post-socialist China
Beth Notar, Trinity College
Recent discussions of authenticity have led to fruitful examinations of the cultural politics of originality and the invention of tradition. However, broadening the definition of authenticity to include the "trustworthy" and "reliant" leads us to consider another political arena: that of the market. This paper investigates the politics of production and consumption in China’s southwestern frontier town of Dali, Yunnan. Dali is a predominantly Bai minority nationality town that gained a reputation as a place for transnational backpackers to "get away from it all," experience borderland culture and purchase handicraft souvenirs. Locals have aimed to produce an "authentic" experience for the transnational tourists, but have begun to turn to the well-established global market system of searching for cheaper labor and have started to subcontract out souvenir production to other places. Simultaneously, locals have expressed concern that the national and transnational goods and currencies coming into Dali from other places are jia de, or "fake." This concern reveals a larger anxiety about China’s transition to a market economy and entrance into global trade networks, where both the origins of products and the sources of wealth are becoming increasingly unclear.
Making the Dai Temple Its Own: Ethnic Tourism, Theravada, and Upholding Dai Minority Culture in Contemporary Xishuang Banna, China
Jing Li, University of Pennsylvania
Theravada, as the core of the Dai minority culture system, has been one of the most appealing tourist attractions in the Xishuang Banna (hereafter, Banna) Dai Minority Autonomous Prefecture, China, where tourism has been the leading industry since the 1990s. Religious elites only recently began to actively engage in tourism activities rather than passively experiencing the tourist gaze. This paper examines the crucial role of the local religious elites in upholding Dai culture when facing the commercialization of Dai culture in tourism. These elites, mainly the high ranked local Theravada priests, endeavor to develop their own temple-centered tourist resources in order to support temple schools and to reinforce their religious tradition. In this process, they cooperate with governmental authorities and some powerful tourism companies to facilitate their own tourism practice on the one hand; on the other hand, they make their temple a better space to carry forward Dai culture through building more decent temple schools and strengthening the temples’ ties with the religious authority in Southeast Asia. Consequently, the construction of Dai culture becomes a process of balancing variable cultural forces instead of being thoroughly Hanified.
Ladies of the Lake: Ethnic Tourism and Gender Politics on China’s Southwest Frontier
Eileen Rose Walsh, Yale University
For the Mosuo of Yongning, northwest Yunnan, the rapid development of ethnic tourism has brought new pressures to cultural politics, especially in the areas of gender and class. In the conceptual space the Mosuo occupy in popular media, and for many tourists, notions of "matriarchy" and of women as ever-available-for-men intermingle instead of clash. Past PRC research presented this small matrilineal ethnic group (also referred to as the Na, Naze, or Yongning Naxi) as "matriarchal," while current tourist literature presents Mosuo territory as an overgrown love-nest of nubile maids awaiting tourist adventurers. These descriptions have brought tens of thousands of tourists to the shores of Lu Gu Lake, where a struggling agricultural village has transformed itself into a center of guesthouses and entertainment that is the envy of neighboring communities.
As ethnic tourism has increased across Southeast Asia, sexual politics, conditions of unequal wealth, orientalizing and nationalism have often combined to make sex work its companion. In Mosuo areas, imagined Mosuo identities combine with these factors to fuel the rise of sex work, while state control is present in the imaginings of ethnic identity as well the outcomes. In this paper, I focus on gender and sex work to explore how locals negotiate both imagined identities and the state in identity construction and economic decisions. I compare two events that occurred in this region in 1999—the celebrated and masterfully government-controlled opening of a residence for the Living Buddha of Yongning, and the arrival of state health workers to test sex workers for sexually transmitted diseases.
Strategic Erasures: Fantasy and Conflict on the Borders of Burma and China
Sara Davis, Columbia University
Fifty years ago, the Kuomintang, including some Chinese minorities and funded in part by the U.S., based insurgents in Burma’s Shan State who fought the new Chinese socialist government. Today, this same border region attracts thousands of Chinese and international tourists. Similarly, in other parts of mainland Southeast Asia, play is transforming regions bloodied by war, replacing local histories of conflict with late modern fantasies of innocence and naïveté.
Local responses to this phenomenon, however, are mixed. While many locals on these borders profit from the tourist gold rush, others decry it, and some do both simultaneously. Ethnic dissidents in Burma call for a tourism boycott to protest the regime’s complicity in rights abuses. On the Chinese side of the same border, ethnic minorities in Yunnan and Tibet largely cooperate with state tourism projects; but some religious and ethnic minorities use tourism as a platform from which to promulgate critical views. Religious sites are especially ambiguous: in both China and Burma, Tai Buddhist temples promoted by the state to tourists have become nodes for local ethnic mobilization as well as capital flows.
Tourism is nested in all these larger political and economic processes. How do tourist fantasy and play rewrite local histories, erasing troubled pasts? How are they strategically encouraged by states in order to manage disaffected border peoples? What is lost and what is gained in the process for local political empowerment? This paper explores these questions by drawing on field research in China, Burma and among migrants from both countries in northern Thailand.
Organizer and Chair: Daphne Pi-Wei Lei, University of California, Irvine
Discussant: Dave Williams, Ohio State University
Where is China? The Celestial Kingdom exists in many countries in the form of Chinatown. From San Francisco to Yokohama, from New York to Toronto, the Chinatown, originally formed by diasporic Chinese, has its own specific cultural, social and geographical borders. As Chinese immigrants become more mobile, Chinatown’s borders in turn become more fluid and permeable. Migration into and out of Chinatown provides a continuous flow of energy in the formation of Chinatown. At the same time, artistic and political discourse creates a new kind of Chinatown, the borders of which are policed not by residents of the old Chinatown, but by new groups: artists, scholars, politicians, businesspeople and second generation Chinese.
Our interdiscplinary panel will investigate such border-crossings and border-formations from the perspectives of anthropology, film studies, religion and theatre. Who is creating and enforcing the borders? Who may and may not cross such borders? And ultimately, how does Chinatown help define true "Chineseness"?
Tien-shi Chen analyzes different kinds of borders in Yokohama’s Chinatown in relation to Japanese immigration policy and Japanese cultural acceptance. Terry Woo examines various religious boundaries in the four Chinatowns in the Metropolitan Toronto area. Sabine Haenni and Daphne Lei focus on the representation of Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco in performing arts (film and theatre) and in extra-filmic discourse and paratheatricality surrounding this art. Dave Williams will discuss all the papers to generate a dialogue among the various disciplines.
The Meaning of Border for Chinese Diaspora: The Case of Yokohama Chinatown
Tien-shi Chen, University of Tokyo
This paper intends to clarify the meaning of various kinds of borders, both visible and invisible, and how they affect the life and identity of Chinese diaspora. I use Yokohama Chinatown as my case study in this paper.
Chinese diaspora seems to form a transnational network that enables ethnic Chinese to cross borders regularly and to enjoy the free mobility in the "borderless" society. However, in reality, they are facing numerous barriers and boundaries. By analyzing the historical formation of community, Japan’s immigration policy and its antagonism against pro-PRC and pro-ROC groups, gaps between old and new immigrants, I find that in the case of Yokohama Chinatown, there are at least five kinds of borders: national, ethnic, ideological, economic, and cultural.
Based on my fieldwork, interviews, and extensive, in-depth involvement with Chinese communities in Yokohama, this paper examines how these borders affect the lives of ethnic Chinese and the formation of their identity. Ethnic Chinese in Yokohama seem to have flexible identities and diverse social networks. Can they travel between Chineseness and Japaneseness effortlessly? If not, what interrupts this kind of traveling and border-crossing?
Hollywood’s Chinatown
Sabine Haenni, Cornell University
In the early twentieth century, for American tourists, crossing into Chinatown often meant entering an elaborately staged entertainment space based on sensorial overload. Such a staging of Chinatown, often organized by white entrepreneurs with the help of Chinese labor, became complicated in the late teens with the emergence of the feature-length film about Chinatown and of the Asian stars in Hollywood. Focusing on two films starring Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, City of Dim Faces (1918) and The Tong Man (1919) in the context of other contemporaneous writings about Chinatown, this paper looks at how early feature films about Chinatown may have helped their primarily white spectators negotiate an often bewilderingly new, racialized urban modernity.
I explore how a fantasized and filmic Chinatown functioned for both white and Chinese audiences by looking at the films’ production of narrative space—their ways of establishing and penetrating boundaries. I am particularly interested in the films’ production of a "Chinese" domestic space, which is in tension with other more sensational aspects. The focus on transitional spaces (streets, hallways, roofs, alleys and secret rooms) redirects a linear narrative, such as the romantic plot or guiding intertitles. The extra-filmic discourse about "acting" generated by Hayakawa’s performance, and complicated by mixed-race casting, created a new discourse about intimacy. Crossing into filmic Chinatown, I suggest, allowed spectators to cross into other forms of domesticity and of acting, and to experiment, however virtually, with new forms of personhood.
A New Virtual Chinatown: A Study of Cantonese Opera Performance in the Bay Area
Daphne Pi-Wei Lei, University of California, Irvine
On October 18, 1852, Hong Fook Tong marked the "first" Cantonese opera performance in the U.S. (in the American Theatre, San Francisco). A hundred and fifty years later, Cantonese opera in the Bay Area is "dying": senior star performers are retiring, and the only theatre for Cantonese opera in the U.S., the Great Star Theatre, is being demolished. Scholars, artists, businesspeople and politicians have created an alliance to preserve the art and to save the historical landmark. A number of websites, campaigns, benefit performances have been launched in the past few years.
My focus is on a new Chinatown created in Cantonese opera performance and its paratheatrical activities. The paratheatricality, such as charity fund-raising events and political campaigns in the name of Cantonese opera performance, is often much more theatrical than the performance itself. While old cultural and geographical borders seem to be disappearing for Chinatown residents, new boundaries are created by tangential Chinatown citizens (academics, politicians, businesspeople and especially affluent second generation Chinese, who do not live in but live "on" Chinatown). A set of new meanings, boundaries and definitions about Chinatown, with the help of technology, give birth to a new virtual Chinatown. By focusing on a few Cantonese opera performances in San Francisco Chinatown in the past few years, I investigate how this new virtual Chinatown functions for both Chinatown residents and the tangential Chinatown citizens, and how it helps define a new kind of Chineseness in the age of globalization.
Religion in Greater Metropolitan Toronto’s Chinatowns
Terry Woo, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
This paper focuses on the religious boundaries in the four Chinatowns in the Metropolitan Toronto area (downtown, Mississauga, Markham, and Central East Toronto). By analyzing different demographics, settlement patterns, and religious beliefs in the history of Chinese immigration in Canada, I intend to investigate the questions of cultural and religious boundaries in the days of global economy.
In old Chinatowns, shrines of folk Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist deities, and guardian spirits are placed in individual businesses everywhere, whereas Taoist and Buddhist temples and Christian churches are only visible in the oldest and poorest parts of Chinatown.
As the settlement patterns of Chinese immigrants change, newer and more affluent "Chinatowns" have sprung up. These are made up of many Chinese businesses in suburban malls. Unlike the older Chinatowns, very seldom will churches and temples be found in the new business districts. Spirit-shrines are occasionally present in restaurants and grocery stores. As Christian churches stand on the spatial divide between the residential and commercial sections, Buddhist and Taoist temples are much less visible in such new Chinatowns.
Is there a gradual homogenization and acculturation of "Chinatown" to the dominant Euro-Christian culture in Canada? If so, what is the possible significance of the shift in the shaping of Chinatown and in the composition of Chinese religiosity? Does the peaceful co-existence of the diverse religions in Toronto Chinatowns offer any new insights for such questions?
Chair: Robert B. Marks, Whittier College
Discussants: Mark A. Cane, Columbia University; Michael Davis, University of California, Irvine; Thomas Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley; Anne R. Osborne, Rider University; John F. Richards, Duke University
How and why much of Asia in the twentieth century became "the Third World" has been a theme of most narratives of the modern histories of China, India, and Southeast Asia. An important and innovative new book by Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, recasts those narratives by placing late-nineteenth-century Asian history into a global and climatological context. According to Davis, in the late-nineteenth century the most powerful El Niños in 500 years triggered severe drought in much of the future Third World, India and China included. Neither British colonial administrators in India nor a weakened Chinese state could avert devastating famines. These not only killed millions of Asians at the time, but also condemned much of Asia to a grinding Third World poverty. Davis’s explanation of how much of Asia in the twentieth century became part of the Third World thus is global, environmental, multicausal and conjunctural.
This roundtable has two purposes. First, Davis’s work compels historians of Asia to place "their" areas into a broader global and environmental context, forcing historians to reconsider conventional national narratives. Second, experts on India, China, the British empire, and climatology can offer a critique of Davis’s thesis and evidence. This session thus will engage Asianists, both on the roundtable and in the audience, with Davis and each other as we ponder the larger questions of the place of Asia in the making of the modern world.
Organizer: Marion Eggert, Ruhr University, Bochum
Chair: Alexander Mayer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Keywords: interarea, travel, borders, cultural geographies.
In response to this year’s theme of "mobility and cultural geographies," this panel takes "border crossing" literally, assembling papers that deal with records of actual inter- and intra-cultural border crossings. It is strongly interdisciplinary in bringing together scholars of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Luso-Indian studies with differing disciplinary backgrounds (Buddhist studies, cultural anthropology, literature), and in spanning a wide historical range (from the 7th through the 20th centuries). At the same time, the papers are tightly united by common concerns. Methodologically, all papers focus on the textual enactment of cultural inscriptions of physical and cultural space. In terms of content, modes of enacting cultural differences by way of constructing, affirming, rejecting, and/or suspending borders are investigated. The paper by Alexander Henn is based on textual, iconographic and ethnographic material from Portugal and Goa that evinces the politics of staging similarity and difference in the context of early modern Luso-Indian encounters. Alexander Mayer analyzes how the application of a uniform set of sinitic descriptive criteria to non-Chinese cultural spaces serves to integrate and domesticate difference. It evinces an effort to conceive of borders less in terms of absolute but rather in terms of relative cultural difference. The paper by Marion Eggert concerns meditations on the character of the Korean-Chinese border as both setting apart and relating the two cultural spaces. Finally, the paper by Evelyn Schulz analyzes a modern travelogue on Tokyo in order to address issues of infra-cultural and inner-urban enactment of social space.
Mimetic Moments: The Negotiation of Self and Other in Early-Modern Luso-Indian Encounters
Alexander Henn, University of Heidelberg
Following Vasco Da Gama’s landfall at the Malabar coast in 1498, the enterprises of Portuguese colonialists and proselytic activities of Christian missionaries in India initiated a new era of inter-cultural encounter. From the outset it seems therefore obvious to assume that the contacts between Europeans and Indians were guided by the idea of a crossing of cultural borders, respectively a perception of and dealing with cultural differences. However, a closer inspection of relevant sources and evidences suggests that early modern Europeans rather pursued a search for the similar in the Asian territories and, considering Hindus and their religion, acted to a considerable extent under the impression of encountering a sort of distorted or degraded Self. Moreover, there is evidence suggesting that what appears to us today as cultural translation or religious conversion had to contemporary Europeans the character of a mimesis in the ambivalent sense of both an imitation (assimilation, acculturation) and mutation (bodily substitution) of the Other.
In pursuing the hypothesis of the mimetic character of the early-modern Luso-Indian encounters, the paper will analyze textual sources (travelogues, Christian texts, official texts) and iconographic and ethnographic evidences (religious images and monuments, ritual and theatrical performances). A particular case will be to demonstrate the changing meaning of the term gentios or gentoo in the European sources, from "native Christian" in the 16th to "heathen" in the 19th century.
Smoothing Borders in Chinese Buddhist Travelogues
Alexander Mayer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Chinese Buddhists of the 7th century found themselves both at the center of the Chinese and at the same time at the margins of the Buddhist world, separated from the Indian heartland by cultures as various as the city-states of central Asia and nomadic empires such as the Western Turks. Among the extant Chinese records, Xuanzang’s Xiyu ji together with his biography Ci’en zhuan provide the most extensive record of a long series of border crossings. Xuanzang reports how he negotiated his passage to and within India, and how he perceived of his experience.
The study of these materials allows us to draw a picture of the underlying cultural perceptions of borders, of their crossing, and of their constitution. The description of the spaces traversed generally follows a sinitic pattern. The respective borders to be crossed are defined on the background of a systematic catalogue of criteria ranging from physical data such as position and size, townships, crops, climate, psychology and ethics of its inhabitants, language, clothing, religion, etc. The material studied here is premised on an inclusivistic notion integrating and domesticating difference by applying a standard set of descriptive criteria. This inclusivism conceives of the terrestrial dominions as marked by only relative, and not by absolute difference. Accordingly, in terms of the experience of borders and their crossing the emphasis is on the relative closeness of whatever form of human self-expression.
Border-Line and Border-Space in Pak Chiwon’s Yorha ilgi
Marion Eggert, Ruhr University, Bochum
The establishment of the Qing dynasty modified not only the Korean-Chinese relationship and Korean cultural self-definitions, but the border itself underwent palpable changes: from a borderline along the Yalu river, traversion of which meant just one further step in approaching the cultural center to Korean envoys, it developed into an expanded border-space, including a 100-li zone of no-man’s-land between the river and the palisade fence which marked entry into the Qing domain. In stretching the moment of border-crossing into a two-day arduous journey, it became what I call ritualized space, far more conducive to reflections on the border experience than the earlier river passage had been.
An outstanding example is provided by Pak Chiwon’s (1737–1805) Yorha ilgi ("Jehol Diary," 1780). Even the textual structure of this monumental, composite work appears to be related to the border theme: Among the various genres used, the pure diary format is reserved to those parts that actually deal with traversing boundaries. Narrative and discursive reflections on the border and its meaning are scattered throughout these parts. In analyzing them, this paper will attempt to explain the text’s oscillation between concepts of border-line and border-space, relating them to "political" versus "cultural" orderings of space, but also to tensions between Pak Chiwon’s ideological commitment to obliterating the border (i.e., the cultural division between Korea and the Qing sphere), and his narrative interest in highlighting it (and thereby, the grandeur of his journey).
Travelling on the Sumidagawa River: The Experience of Urban Cultural Boundaries in Kimura Shôhachi’s "Tôkyô hanjô ki" (Report about the Prosperity of Tokyo, 1958)
Evelyn Schulz, University of Munich
From Edo’s founding as the Tokugawa capital in the early seventeenth century onwards the Sumidagawa has not only functioned as the city’s major transport route but also as an inner-urban boundary in a historical and cultural sense. The areas to the west of the river were associated with Edo’s specific urban culture, while those to its east were perceived to be a terra incognita associated with the ideas of myth and untouched wilderness. Travelling across the Sumidagawa thus marked a transition from a space dominated by the rules of the shogunate to one without the restrictions of a feudal society.
However, in the course of Japan’s modernization, this cultural landscape changed tremendously and with it the meaning of the river-boundary. It now came to represent a link between the past—Edo—and modern Tokyo. Crossing the Sumidagawa signified a passage from modernity to tradition.
This structure becomes evident in the large corpus of travelogues on Tokyo among which the Tôkyô hanjô ki can be counted. I will show how Kimura Shôhachi (1893–1958) develops images of Tôkyô connected with his critical view of Japan’s modernization. Relying both on his own observations and descriptions in older publications, he points out the transformations of the area concerned, thereby throwing light on the changing meaning of the river as a boundary. But his contribution does not stop at an historical overview; rather, he adds a new layer of meaning: the ambivalent symbolization of both resistance against and defeat by modernity.
Organizer and Chair: Navtej Purewal, University of Asia and the Pacific
Critical analysis of recollection and recitation of the past has become an area of enquiry for those interested in the ways in which subjectivity, power and discourses get transmitted over time. Indeed, oral histories (documented and undocumented), fiction, literature and critical subaltern historiographies have been some of the routes or mediums by which tales of the past have been expressed as potentially decentering accounts for the purposes of articulating presents and futures. The significance of such accounts for the construction and reconstruction of identities, communities and nations can often make seemingly colossal discourses and societal structures seem translucent and mutative, offering a space for critical interpretation of histories for contemporary utilization. Reference to one’s past (collective or individual), while necessitating self-reflection, can open a dialogue, if not invoke conflict, between the various interests at stake in the construction of histories and identities. This panel explores some of these potentialities by reflecting upon the ways in which time and/or distance can enable a critical vantage point from which to pose unbound presents and futures through an envisioning or re-visioning of identity through memory. The questions that these "imaginaries" present are examined through a range of regions, mediums, historical contexts and locations.
Massacre, Memory, and Engendering History: Remembering the Role of Women in the Aftermath of the Massacre of the Muslim Population of Southwest China in 1873
Jacqueline Armijo-Hussein, Stanford University
In 1873, in the aftermath of the Chinese government’s successful defeat of an independent multiethnic Islamic Kingdom based in Southwest China, government troops carried out a systematic and brutal massacre of the Muslim population (Hui) of Yunnan. This government-sponsored ethnic cleansing is estimated to have resulted in the death or forced relocation of as much as 90% of the Muslim population (estimated to be one million at the time). This research is based on interviews with the survivors’ descendants, and discusses the incorporation of collective memories into present-day conceptions of religious and ethnic identity and the idealization of the role of women in community survival.
By concentrating on the experiences of women in this particular case of ethnic/religious cleansing, and how their role is remembered by present-day descendants, we can see how the brutality and sexual violence perpetuated by men on women can be transformed into a collective badge of honor rather than a source of individual shame. Recent events in Bosnia and Kosovo have been well documented and have forced us to acknowledge the systematic violence perpetuated against women in times of conflict. These reports have also enabled us to reexamine earlier periods of mass violence in order to better understand the consequences for women and the roles played by women, and the different ways in which these communities have responded to the "damaged" bodies of their female relatives.
Filipino Diasporic Imaginations as Non-imaginaries
Sharon Orig, University of Asia and the Pacific
The Platonic concept of literature circumvented the idea of poetry as a mimesis. The term mimesis was a Greek word referring to the notion of "mirror" or "reflection." Literature can then hardly be purely fictional since it takes snapshots of reality and transposes it into creative writing. In Exile and Diaspora, San Juan historicizes the works of Carlos Bulosan, a resident Filipino writer of the United States in the years 1930–1956. He situates Bulosan’s writings in the context of the Filipino’s struggle for racial equality in the global arena. Similarly, this paper approaches literature as a social document containing fictitious but representative experiences of the diasporic Filipino. It limns the cultural and historical dimensions of the Filipino’s crisis over his identity as gleaned from three contemporary narratives. In the novel I Married an American, Precioso Nicanor delves into the pathos of a Filipino immigrant caught in the intricate web of miscegenation in the 1950s. In the novelette Goodbye, Barbie, Edilberto Tiempo dramatizes the inchoate camaraderie between two young girls, a Filipina and an American. Eventually, the friendship falters as both girls imbibe the miasma of America’s racism. Jose Dalisay’s short story "We Global Men" parodies the irony behind a successful Filipino’s intellectual and professional achievements in Scotland. In spite of his accomplishments, Dalisay’s protagonist is haunted by an identity linked to his colonial past vis-à-vis an identity wrought by the victimization of Filipinas in the sex trade.
Remembering 1947: A Journey into the Making of the Indo-Pak Border
Jatin Dua, Reed College; David McDougal, Reed College
In spite of its enduring legacy in modern South Asia, the Partition of India in 1947 is often glossed over in Indian and Pakistani histories as an aberration in an otherwise glorious march to freedom. Others depict the mass violence of the Partition and the resulting displacement as inevitable consequences of "natural" enmities between Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus. Such readings, in the quest for nationalist legitimacy or communal solidarity, ignore the pain and ambiguity that characterized the birth of the Indian and Pakistani nation-states. More recently, works such as Urvashi Butalia’s Other Side of Silence have marked a significant shift in Partition historiography by focusing on "non traditional" archives such as oral histories and literature to "capture" a more experiential dimension of the division of British India. In a similar vein, based on fieldwork conducted among survivors on both sides of the Indo-Pak border in the northwestern region of Punjab, this documentary seeks to highlight the ambiguities and complexities in the experiences of communities that lived through the partitioning of the Punjab. A focus on the border provides a critical vantage point from which we seek to understand the varied and contested legacies of Partition and its impact on shaping subjectivities in contemporary South Asia and beyond.
Misplaced Borders and Displaced Geographies: Diasporic Spaces and Partitioned Memories
Navtej Purewal, University of Asia and the Pacific
There have been a plethora of studies on the partition of Punjab covering the social, demographic, emotional and political dimensions of the created division between newly emerging India and Pakistan in 1947. More recently, the fiftieth anniversary of the partition in 1997 saw an increased attention placed upon oral histories in capturing the experiential dimensions of the partition, marking a shift not only towards more qualitative understandings of the partition but also to giving voice to perspectives not merely confined to the nation (Indian or Pakistani). This paper examines the method and contributions of oral histories in their attempts to "capture" memories of the partition in 1947. The notion of the "border" is taken both literally and metaphorically as a means for inter-rogating the ways in which discourses of identity, community and location have since been constructed in diasporic contexts. Theorizations and locations of diaspora, it is argued, present a critical vantage point from which to explore borders as signifiers of belonging, longing and (dis)location. By critically examining the representation of partition narratives in (post)nationalist discourses and individual oral histories through the lens of post-colonial theory, this article argues that the geographical border resulting from partition has had complex repercussions for the ways in which South Asian diasporic communities, here namely in Britain, have negotiated with the historical event of partition, the resulting dominant nationalist discourses and the remaking of post-colonial nations and communities. By focusing on diasporic "border zones" in urban Britain, the paper invokes a cultural studies approach to analyzing symbols and expressions of community and difference in these areas of complex historical and contemporary negotiation.