What is it about?
A review article focuses on the two masterpieces-- Wang Gungwu’s Home is Not Here, and Dear China by Liu Hong and Gregory Benton--in the field of Chinese overseas. It engages in Shi Shu-mei’s “against diaspora” thesis. The main argument is that as long as race remains a valid category to understand inter-ethnic interaction, the paradigm of Chinese overseas has its place.
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Why is it important?
The article reviews the studies that place nostalgia and family ties in the understanding of Chinese overseas in the long nineteenth and early 20th centuries. It also points out that the country of China is not necessarily the home of Chinese diaspora. The idea of home should be related to cultural value (in whichever forms and transformations).
Perspectives
Water flows faster than blood, so we need an academic paradigm of Chinese overseas research. Chinese (Hua) is a cultural and ethnic concept, of which the imaginations of China are diverse among those who or whose ancestors left the country. The Chinese overseas paradigm can provide a pair of comparative lenses to study different political leanings and ethnic (un)makings among ethnic Chinese (migrants from China, citizens of non-China countries who consider themselves Chinese, or citizens in non-Chinese countries being classified or viewed as Chinese). This comparative approach is useful to counter both Eurocentric race-based classification and PRC official nationalism.
Dr Huei-Ying Kuo
Johns Hopkins University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ink of Nostalgia: A Review Article of Home is Not Here, Dear China, and Recent Scholarship on China and the Chinese Overseas, China and Asia, February 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/2589465x-02020005.
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