Author: Ien Ang

Publisher:Routledge

Publishing Year: 2001

Call Number: DS732.A581

Description: In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalization and diaspora. The starting-point for Ang’s discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself “faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty”-surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She wrties:’It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of “Chineseness”in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn’t speak Chinese; in the West I wa different because I looked Chinese.’

From this autobiographical beginning, And goes on to reflect upon tensions between ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of ‘Chineseness’ in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate ‘Chinese’ with ‘Asian’ identity.