Asian Diasporas

Asian diasporas are all too often seen in terms of settlement problems in a host nation, where the focus is on issues of crime, housing, employment, racism and related concerns. The essays in this volume view Asian diasporic movements in the context of globalization and global citizenship, in which multiple cultural allegiances, influences and claims together create complex negotiations of identity.

Examining a range of cultural documents through which such negotiations are conducted —literature and other forms of writing, media, popular culture, urban spaces, military inscriptions, and so on—the essays in this volumeexplore the meanings and experiences involved in the two major Asian diasporic movements, those of South and East Asia.

Robbie B. H. Goh is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He has published widely on global cultures and Asian studies, including Sparks of Grace: The Story of Methodism in Asia and Singapore Space and the Dialogics of Culture. Award-wining novelist Shawn Wong is the author of Homebase and American Knees and editor or co-editor of six anthologies of literature, including the landmark Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. He is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington and Director of the University’s Honors Programme.

“This is a wonderful and timely volume, with fine essays that range from being informative, insightful to downright provocative. The book not only puts Asian diasporas on the global map from a decidedly Asia-centred point of view; it is also a welcome critical contribution to the burgeoning field of diasporic studies worldwide.” —Ien Ang, Professor of Cultural Studies; Director of the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia

“Asian Diasporas is an exciting departure from Ethnic Studies notions of diaspora. Robbie Goh and Shawn Wong have assembled leading Asia-based scholars to chart the carnivalesque and fluid dimensions of postcolonial diasporic cultures. Interrogating cultural theory, texts, and performance, the authors probe the interstitial positioning, unsettling hybridity, and symbolic violence experienced by diasporic Indian and Chinese subjects. Contrary to claims about ethnic nationalism, Asian diasporic subjects are haunted by the absences and silences, while negotiating a transnational identity and orientation towards other homes in a global itinerary.” —Aihwa Ong, author of Flexible Citizenship (1999) and Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (2003)