Region and Microhistory: Writing the Chinese Diaspora in the Philippines
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: THIS SPECIAL SECTION OF KRITIKA KULTURA aims to showcase new studies on the Chinese diaspora in the Philippines.In particular, the three articles deal with "regional" forms of transnationalisms, loosely defined as pertaining to those travels-whether educational, personal, political, economic, or even romantic itineraries-between the Philippines and what is now called "East Asia" (Northeast and Southeast Asia).1 By focusing on transnational "Chinese" family histories, they attempt to go beyond the methodological nationalism that treats the "nation/state/ society" as the "natural social and political form of the modern world" (Wimmer and Schiller 301; see also Emmerson 1-21).Shaped by the exigencies of decolonization, the Cold War, and post-colonial nation-building, earlier accounts and analyses of the history of the diasporic Chinese have been largely confined within the territorially-bounded Philippine colonial and national state.Moreover, their reliance on sociological paradigms of the time have sometimes resulted in a tendency to cast the ethnic identities of these diasporic subjects in binarist, either-or terms, in the interest of subsuming the life stories of these subjects into metanarratives of the Philippine or Chinese national histories.The popularity of transnational approaches to the study of the Chinese diaspora over the past two decades is part of a broader intellectual critique of the nationstate as a unit of study and action; and as a geopolitical, economic, and cultural system.2By focusing on the dynamic and complex flows, interconnections, and Forum Kritika: Regional Studies on the Chinese Diaspora in the Philippines
Source: Kritika Kultura
Authors: Richard Chu, Caroline Hau
Institutions: University of Massachusetts Amherst, Kyoto University
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2002269711