In various ways, Chinese diasporic communities seek to connect and re-connect with their “homelands” in literature, film, and visual culture. The essays in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora examine how diasporic bodies and emotions interact with space and place, as well as how theories of affect change our thinking of diaspora. Questions of borders and border-crossing, not to mention the public and private spheres, in diaspora literature and film raise further questions about mapping and spatial representation and the affective and geographical significance of the push-and-pull movement in diasporic communities. The unique experience is represented differently by different authors across texts and media. In an age of globalization, in “the Chinese Century,” the spatial representation and cultural experiences of mobility, displacement, settlement, and hybridity become all the more urgent. The essays in this volume respond to this urgency, and they help to frame the study of Chinese diaspora and culture today.

In various ways, Chinese diasporic communities seek to connect and re-connect with their "homelands" in literature, film, and visual culture. The essays in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora examine how diasporic bodies and emotions interact with space and place, as well as how theories of affect change our thinking of diaspora. Questions of borders and border-crossing, not to mention the public and private spheres, in diaspora literature and film raise further questions about mapping and spatial representation and the affective and geographical significance of the push-and-pull movement in diasporic communities. The unique experience is represented differently by different authors across texts and media. In an age of globalization, in "the Chinese Century," the spatial representation and cultural experiences of mobility, displacement, settlement, and hybridity become all the more urgent. The essays in this volume respond to this urgency, and they help to frame the study of Chinese diaspora and culture today.

Transpacific Cartographies examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Focusing on cultural productions of the Chinese diaspora from the 1990s to the present -- including novels by the Sinophone writers Yan Geling (The Criminal Lu Yanshi), Shi Yu (New York Lover), Chen Qian (Listen to the Caged Bird Sing), and Rong Rong (Notes of a Couple), as well as by the Anglophone writer Ha Jin (A Free Life; A Map of Betrayal), selected TV shows (Beijinger in New York; The Way We Were), and online literature -- Melody Yunzi Li argues that the characters in these stories create multilayered maps that transcend the territorial boundaries that make finding a home in a foreign land a seemingly impossible task. In doing so, these “maps” outline a transpacific landscape that reflects the psycho-geography of homemaking for diasporic communities. Intersecting with and bridging Sinophone studies, Chinese American studies, and diaspora studies and drawing on theories of literary cartography, Transpacific Cartographies demonstrates how these “maps” offer their readers different paths for finding a sense of home no matter where they are.

Leading scholars in the field consider the profound importance of meanings of place and the spatial processes of mobility and settlement for the Chinese overseas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

This book explores how memories are used to re-establish a sense of belonging, analyzing the relationships between migrants' adjustment, assimilation and re-membering home. It considers memories as social expressions as well as the tensions and conflicts in representing and renegotiating memories in literature and cinema.

With around 30 million migrants worldwide, the ethnic Chinese and the Chinese in diaspora form the largest diaspora in the world. The economic reform of China in the late 1970s marked a huge phase of migration from China, and the new migrants have had a major impact on the local societies (including the ethnic Chinese) and on China. The transnational networks between the Chinese in diaspora and China have become even more significant as China has emerged as an economic world power.

China’s rapid economic growth has drawn attention to the Chinese diasporic communities and the multiple networks that link Chinese individuals and organizations throughout the world. Ethnic Chinese have done very well economically, and the role of the Chinese Diaspora in China’s economic success has created a myth that their relations with China is natural and primordial, and that regardless of their base outside China and generation of migration, the Chinese Diaspora are inclined to participate enthusiastically in China’s social and economic agendas. This book seeks to dispel such a myth. By focusing on Guangdong, the largest ancestral and native homeland, it argues that not all Chinese diasporic communities are the same in terms of mentality and orientation, and that their connections to the ancestral homeland vary from one community to another. Taking the two Cantonese-speaking localities of Panyu and Xinyi, Yow Cheun Hoe examines the hierarchy of power and politics of these two localities in terms of their diasporic kinsfolk in Singapore and Malaysia, in comparison with their counterparts in North America and Hong Kong. The book reveals that, particularly in China’s reform era since 1978, the arguably primordial sentiment and kinship are less than crucial in determining the content and magnitude of linkages between China and the overseas Chinese. Rather, it suggests that since 1978 business calculation and economic rationale are some of the key motivating factors in determining the destination and degree of diasporic engagement. Examining various forms of Chinese diasporic engagement with China, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese Diaspora, Chinese culture and society, Southeast Asian culture and society and ethnicity.

The papers collected in this anthology look at Chinese overseas, residing in five continents in the half century after the Second World War, from many new perspectives. Some papers raise questions about the Chinese diaspora in broad conceptual terms, and inquire into the meaning of being Chinese outside China. Other papers examine life in local communities, analysing how historical and contemporary circumstances affect their lives and the ways they negotiate their identity in the host country. In-depth case studies further bring out the complexity of the subject by identifying the range of variables, including the social, economic, political and cultural characteristics of the places of origin and destinations, as well as emigration and immigration policies, which affect the patterns of migration and the nature of settlement in any place at any time. This is especially highlighted in chapters using a comparative approach. With scholars from different disciplines, using different types of data, methodologies and theoretical tools, the richness of the subject matter becomes apparent. This volume will no doubt go a long way both to broaden and deepen our understanding of the Chinese overseas, and, by showing the many possibilities for further investigation, to strengthen Chinese overseas as a field of study.

Chinese migrant communities have reinvented their histories in many contexts, but the process of globalization has accelerated and diversified this phenomenon. Their fluid identities, innovative modernities, and generative talents in overcoming prejudice and multiple dislocations offer powerful examples of creative resistance to placebound traditions and nationalist histories. As the velocity of exchange in global media and commerce steadily increases, emergent and dynamic diasporas are increasingly influential in transnational discourses. This volume engages cultural representations of the subjectivities and loyalties of Chinese migrant communities, including analyses of aesthetic texts, as well as theoretical approaches in cultural studies. The book situates diasporic agency as an historical phenomenon with far-reaching political and social implications for both home and host societies and as a major site of contemporary cultural developments. By assembling a variety of regional, temporal, and disciplinary perspectives, it interrogates current notions of the diasporic subject, raising questions about respective ideological roots and cultural repositories as well as extensions and transgressions of new aesthetic vocabularies. Contributors include Roland Altenburger, Pheng Cheah, Prasenjit Duara, Kathrin Ensinger, Ping-kwan Leung, Helen F. Siu, Tamara S. Wagner, Mary Shuk-han Wong, Sau-ling C. Wong and Nicolas Zufferey.

This book focuses on International migration among the Chinese long before European colonists set foot on the Asian continent. Long before European colonists set foot on the Asian continent, the Chinese moved across sea and land, seasonally or permanently, to other parts of Asia and the rest of the world to pursue economic opportunities and alternative means of livelihood. This volume addresses the new Chinese diasporas around the world, offering a snapshot of the cosmopolitan and shifting nature of Chinese population dynamics from the perspectives of anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of international studies.