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Denationalizing Identities
Denationalizing Identities explores the relationship between performance and ideology in the global Sinosphere. Wah Guan Lim's study of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan, Danny Yung Ning Tsun, and Kuo Pao Kun—shows the impact of theater on ideas of "Chineseness" across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. At the height of the Cold War, the "Bamboo Curtain" divided the "two Chinas" across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Hong Kong prepared for its handover to the People's Republic of China and Singapore rethought Chinese education. As geopolitical tensions imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, these four dramatists wove together local, foreign, and Chinese elements in their art, challenging mainland China's narrative of an inevitable communist outcome. By performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they debunked notions of a unified Chineseness. Denationalizing Identities highlights the key role theater and performance played in circulating people and ideas across the Chinese-speaking world, well before cross-strait relations began to thaw.
Boundaries and Beyond
Using the concept of boundaries, physical and cultural, to understand the development of China’s maritime southeast in late Imperial times, and its interactions across maritime East Asia and the broader Asian Seas, these linked essays by a senior scholar in the field challenge the usual readings of Chinese history from the centre. After an opening essay which positions China’s southeastern coast within a broader view of maritime Asia, the first section of the book looks at boundaries, between “us” and “them”, Chinese and other, during this period. The second section looks at the challenges to such rigid demarcations posed by the state and existed in the status quo. The third sect...
Singapore
On 9 August 2015, Singapore celebrated its 50th year of national independence, a milestone for the nation as it has overcome major economic, social, cultural and political challenges in a short period of time. Whilst this was a celebratory event to acknowledge the role of the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, it was also marked by national remembrance as founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew died in March 2015. This book critically reflects on Singapore’s 50 years of independence. Contributors interrogate a selected range of topics on Singapore’s history, culture and society – including the constitution, education, religion and race – and thereby facilitate a better understand...
Strangers in the Family
In Strangers in the Family, Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java. Departing from male-centered narratives of Ooverseas Chinese communities, Strangers in the Family tells the history of community- formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Seng showcases women's moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women's place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.
Contesting Chineseness
Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international...
The Binding Tie
Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has become the most trade-intensive economy in the world and the richest country in Southeast Asia. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of a deep generational divide. More complex than simple disparities of education or changes in income and consumption patterns, this growing gulf encompasses language, religion, and social memory. The Binding Tie explores how expectations and obligations between generations are being challenged, reworked, and reaffirmed in the face of far-reaching societal change. The family remains a pivotal feature of Singaporean society and the primary unit of support. The author focuses on the middle gen...
The Appearances of Memory
In The Appearances of Memory, the Indonesian architectural and urban historian Abidin Kusno explores the connections between the built environment and political consciousness in Indonesia during the colonial and postcolonial eras. Focusing primarily on Jakarta, he describes how perceptions of the past, anxieties about the rapid pace of change in the present, and hopes for the future have been embodied in architecture and urban space at different historical moments. He argues that the built environment serves as a reminder of the practices of the past and an instantiation of the desire to remake oneself within, as well as beyond, one’s particular time and place. Addressing developments in I...
Migration in the Time of Revolution
Migration in the Time of Revolution explores the complex relationship between China and Indonesia from 1945 to 1967, during a period when citizenship, identity, and political loyalty were in flux. Taomo Zhou examines the experiences of migrants, including youths seeking an ancestral homeland they had never seen and economic refugees whose skills were unwelcome in a socialist state. Zhou argues that these migrants played an active role in shaping the diplomatic relations between Beijing and Jakarta, rather than being passive subjects of historical forces. By using newly declassified documents and oral history interviews, Migration in the Time of Revolution demonstrates how the actions and decisions of ethnic Chinese migrants were crucial in the development of post-war relations between China and Indonesia. By integrating diplomatic history with migration studies, Taomo Zhou provides a nuanced understanding of how ordinary people's lives intersected with broader political processes in Asia, offering a fresh perspective on the Cold War's social dynamics.
Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands
Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands explores what has been required of the Maya to survive both internal and external threats and other destabilizing forces. These include shifting power dynamics and sociocultural transformations, tumultuous political regimes, the precarity of newly formed nation states, migration in search of refuge, and newly globalizing economies in the Yucatecan lowlands in the Late Colonial to Early National periods—the times when formal Spanish colonial rule was giving way to Yucatecan and Mexican neocolonial settler systems. The work takes a hemispheric approach to the historical and material analysis of colonialism, bridging the often disparate literatures on colonial...
Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era
Answering the calls made to overcome methodological nationalism, this volume is the first examination of the links between corruption and imperial rule in the modern world. It does so through a set of original studies that examine the multi-layered nature of corruption in four different empires (Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and France) and their possessions in Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. It offers a key read for scholars interested in the fields of corruption, colonialism/empire and global history. The chapters ‘Introduction: Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: Towards a Global Perspective’, ‘“Corrupt and rapacious”: Colonial Spanish-American past through the eyes of early nineteenth century contemporaries. A contribution from the history of emotions’, and ‘Colonial Normativity? Corruption in the Dutch-Indonesian Relationship in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries’ are Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
