Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: This special issue is the first part of a larger project titled Several Things That We Are Discontented with in Overseas Chinese Studies.It consists of three papers, each of which attends to one key issue in the field of overseas Chinese studies that the respective contributor sees as problematic.Alvis Sio takes issue with the idea of identity that is popular among academics in various disciplines, whilst focusing upon the field of overseas Chinese studies.Sio criticizes the widely held idea of Hong Kong identity being a hybrid of Hong Kong and Chinese identity.Scholars adopting this idea, according to Sio, tend to ignore the historically particular socio-political context that gave rise to Hong Kong identity in the 1970s.She argues that the emergence of Hong Kong identity should be understood as the result of British colonial policy in Hong Kong that aimed to differentiate the people of Hong Kong from those of mainland China by 'modernizing' the former in the 1970s.It was in the course of the imposition of a new consciousness colonially on the people of Hong Kong that the people of Hong Kong gradually developed a new sense of self as Hong Kongers.The most important theoretical implication of Sio's paper is that identity itself is a recognition of the differentiation of 'self' from the 'other,' which is unavoidably shaped by social, political, and economic contexts.More importantly, identification is also a matter of self-positioning, which is to say that identification must be understood strategically and in its specific historical context.The methodological implication is that instead of primarily focusing on the content of identity, we should direct our research to the structure of the diverse contexts operating at different levels which collectively give rise to identity.What is important is not the content of identity but how people position themselves in a certain way against the other and why.Thus just as the matter of Hong Kong identity is inseparable from the social, economic, and political contexts which gave rise to it, scholars working on 'Chineseness' in overseas Chinese studies should not be searching for some essence of identity Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives
Author: Heung Wah Wong
Institution: University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4365515537