Author: Suchen Christine Lim

Publisher: Singapore Tourism Board & SNP International Publishing Pte Ltd

Publishing year: 2005

Call number: DS732.L732

Description: During the 1800s and early 1900s, war and pestilence drove thousands of Chinese to every part of the world in search of a better life. This diaspora was one of the great events of the modern history, and the story of its sojourners and migrant workers was one of the pain, courage and enterprise

Hua Song celebrates the spirit and memory of those who left their homes for a dream. It weaves together the threads of this epic journey and gives voice to the men and women who undertook it. This jewel box of archival images and artefacts recalls a common past, bringing to vivid life the continuing story of the Chinese overseas.

Author: Aihwa Ong

Publisher: Duke University Press

Publishing year: 1999

Call number: DS732.N58

Description: Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalization. Are nation-states being transformed by globalization into a single globalized economy? Do global cultural forces herald a postnational millennium? Tying ethnography to structural analysis, Flexible Citizenship explores such questions with a focus on the links between the cultural logics of human action and on economic and political processes within the Asia-Pacific, including the impact of these forces on women and family life.
Explaining how intensified travel, communications, and mass media have created a transnational Chinese public, Aihwa Ong argues that previous studies have mistakenly viewed transnationality as necessarily detrimental to the nation-state and have ignored individual agency in the large-scale flow of people, images, and cultural forces across borders. She describes how political upheavals and global markets have induced Asian investors, in particular, to blend strategies of migration and of capital accumulation and how these transnational subjects have come to symbolize both the fluidity of capital and the tension between national and personal identities. Refuting claims about the end of the nation-state and about “the clash of civilizations,” Ong presents a clear account of the cultural logics of globalization and an incisive contribution to the anthropology of Asia-Pacific modernity and its links to global social change.
This pioneering investigation of transnational cultural forms will appeal to those in anthropology, globalization studies, post-colonial studies, history, Asian studies, Marxist theory, and cultural studies.