Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas is the first book to analyse the recent upsurge in museums on Chinese diasporas in China. Examining heritage-making beyond the nation state, the book provides a much-needed, critical examination of China’s engagement with its diasporic communities. Drawing on fieldwork in more than ten museums, as well as interviews with museum practitioners and archival study, Wang offers a timely analysis of the complex ways in which Chinese diasporas are represented in the museum space of China, the ancestral homeland. Arguing that diasporic heritage is highly ambivalent and introducing a diasporic perspective to the study of cultural heritage, this book opens up a new avenue of inquiry into the study and management of cultural heritage in China and beyond. Most importantly, perhaps, Wang sheds new light on the dynamic between China and Chinese diasporas through the lens of the museum. Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas takes a transnational perspective that will draw attention to the under-researched connections between heritage, mobility and meaning in a global context. As such, this cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to scholars and students working in the museum and heritage studies fields, as well as those studying Asia, China, migration and diaspora, anthropology, history and culture.

In Diaspora’s Homeland Shelly Chan provides a broad historical study of how the mass migration of more than twenty million Chinese overseas influenced China’s politics, economics, and culture. Chan develops the concept of “diaspora moments”—a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national, and global ones—to map the multiple historical geographies in which the Chinese homeland and diaspora emerge. Chan describes several distinct moments, including the lifting of the Qing emigration ban in 1893, intellectual debates in the 1920s and 1930s about whether Chinese emigration constituted colonization and whether Confucianism should be the basis for a modern Chinese identity, as well as the intersection of gender, returns, and Communist campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Adopting a transnational frame, Chan narrates Chinese history through a reconceptualization of diaspora to show how mass migration helped establish China as a nation-state within a global system.

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.

In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibility as South Asian Americans in U.S. public culture and to reflect on their desires to be represented.

This text provides an alternative narrative to the humble and often exclusively male voices of first generation Chinese migrants. Despite Chinese migrants having migrated to the Netherlands since 1911, particularly after World War Two, and female migrants outnumbering male migrants, their everyday life and transnational motherhood experiences have remained largely unknown. Based on the narratives of 38 Chinese migrant women from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, this book brings women, their lives and opinions to the center of Dutch migration history.

Qiaopi is one of several names given to the “silver letters” Chinese emigrants sent home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These letters-cum-remittances document the changing history of the Chinese diaspora in different parts of the world and in different times. Dear China is the first book-length study in English of qiaopi and of the origins, structure, and operations of the qiaopi trade. The authors explore the characteristics and transformations of qiaopi, showing how such institutionalized and cross-national mechanisms helped sustain families separated by distance and state frontiers and contributed to the sending regions’ socioeconomic development. Dear China contributes substantially to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration.

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!