Aihwa Ong

Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]

This paper views cultural citizenship as a process of self-making and being-made in relation to nation-states and transnational processes. Whereas some scholars claim that racism has been replaced by cultural fundamentalism in defining who belongs or does not belong in Western democracies, this essay argues that hierarchical schemes of racial and cultural difference intersect in a complex, contingent way to locate minorities of color from different class backgrounds. Comparing the experiences of rich and poor Asian immigrants to the United States, the author discusses institutional practices whereby nonwhite immigrants in the First World are simultaneously, though unevenly, subjected to two processes of normalization : an ideological whitening or blackening that reflects dominant racial oppositions and an assessment of cultural competence based on imputed human capital and consumer power in the minority subject. Immigrants from Asia or poorer countries must daily negotiate the lines of difference established by state agencies as well as groups in civil society. A subsidiary point is that, increasingly, such modalities of citizen-making are influenced by transnational capitalism. Depending on their locations in the global economy, some immigrants of color have greater access than others to key institutions in state and civil society. Global citizenship thus confers citizenship privileges in Western democracies to a degree that may help the immigrant to scale racial and cultural heights but not to circumvent status hierarchy based on racial difference

Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of being Global

Introduction F Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global PR … the skyline rises in the East. Rem Koolhaas O O Aihwa Ong U N C O R R EC TE D Cities rise and fall, but the vagaries of urban fate cannot be reduced to the workings of universal laws established by capitalism or colonial history. Caught in the vectors of particular histories, national aspirations, and flows of cultures, cities have always been the principal sites for launching world-conjuring projects. Today, urban dreams and schemes play with accelerating opportunities and accidents that circulate in ever-widening spirals across the planet. Emerging nations exercise their new power by assembling glass and steel towers to project particular visions of the world. Once again, as Rem Koolhaas (2004) notes, “the skyline rises in the East,” as cities vie with one another, and regional aspirations are superseded by new horizons of the global. In the 1970s, New York City was celebrated for its architectural constel- lation, which fostered a “delirious” culture of congestion. Koolhaas (1997) called New York “The City of the Captive Global,” one that unites the modern with perpetual motion. But by the early twenty-first century, the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008 (called the Great Recession) dealt a reversal of fortune for New York, London, and Tokyo. As these mighty cities struggle to retain their lead as financial powerhouses, Singapore and Dubai are emerging as centers of global finance. Meanwhile, China’s role as the banker of the world has made Shanghai and Hong Kong the shares-selling capitals of the world. While capitals of big economies remain crucial players, Asian economies have skyrocketed, and the Asian world has witnessed the stunning emergence Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, First Edition. Edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong.

Mutations in Citizenship

Mutations in citizenship are crystallized in an ever-shifting landscape shaped by the flows of markets, technologies, and populations. We are moving beyond the citizenship-versus-statelessness model. First, the elements of citizenship (rights, entitlements, etc.) are becoming disarticulated from each other, and becoming re-articulated with universalizing criteria of neoliberalism and human rights. Such ‘global assemblages’ define zones of political entitlements and claims. Second, the space of the ‘assemblage’, rather than the national terrain, becomes the site for political mobilizations by diverse groups in motion. Three contrasting configurations are presented. In the EU zone, unregulated markets and migrant flows challenge liberal citizenship. In Asian zones, foreigners who display self-enterprising savoire faire gain rights and benefits of citizenship. In camps of the disenfranchised or displaced, sheer survival becomes the ground for political claims. Thus, particular constellations shape specific problems and resolutions to questions of contemporary living, further disarticulating and deterritorializing aspects of citizenship.

Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia

Contributors: Evelyn Blackwood Suzanne A. Brenner Janadas Devan Geraldine Heng Jennifer Krier Jane A. Margold Mary Beth Mills Aihwa Ong Michael G. Peletz Jacqueline Siapno

CYBERPUBLICS AND DIASPORA POLITICS AMONG TRANSNATIONAL CHINESE

In August 1998, a global Chinese (huaren) website mobilized worldwide protests against anti-Chinese attacks in Indonesia triggered by the Asian financial crisis. This set of events provides the occasion for a discussion of the necessary conceptual distinction between diaspora and transnationalism. I maintain that diaspora as permanent political exile is often conflated with contemporary forms of fairly unrestricted mobility. ‘Diaspora’, however, gets increasingly invoked by affluent migrants in transnational contexts to articulate an inclusive global ethnicity for disparate populations the world over who may be able to claim a common racial or cultural ancestry. I use the term ‘translocal publics’ to describe the new kinds of disembedded diaspora identifications enabled by technologies and forums of opinionmaking. I consider the promise and the danger of cyber diaspora politics that intervene on behalf of co-ethnics in distant lands. The rise of such diaspora politics may inspire in the members an unjustified sense that cyber-based humanitarian interventions will invariably produce positive results for intended beneficiaries. The Huaren cyberpublic promotes itself as an electronic watchdog for ethnic Chinese communities across the world. But, while ethnic Chinese in Indonesia were grateful for the spotlight cast on their plight, some felt cyber misrepresentations of events and criticisms of Indonesia jeopardized their attempts to commit themselves as Indonesian citizens. Thus, Internet-based articulation of a disembedded global racial citizenship can create invidious essential differences between ethnic others and natives, deepening rather than reducing already existing political and social divisions within particular nations. In short, discourses of a racialized diaspora raise the question of who is accountable to whom in a transnationalized world.

The Chinese Axis: Zoning Technologies and Variegated Sovereignty

Concepts of regionalization and regionalism have dominated discussions of emerging global orders. With the rise of the European Union (EU), scholars have begun to look for similar multilaterally negotiated regional organizations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Please Stay: Pied-a-Terre Subjects in the Megacity

In contrast to the idea of the big city as a denationalized space of human rights, this article proposes an alternate concept of the megacity as a national space that activates “neoliberal” desires for foreign experts, creative know-how, and capital accumulation. In addition, expatriates add to and reflect the symbolic values of Asian cities arriving on the global stage. But the limited commitments of global professionals, actualized and symbolized by the pied-a-terre, deter and challenge the deep commitments required by classic citizenship. Is the global nomad a cog in international information networks, a figure who expresses the fundamental denationalized character of capitalism itself? Or is the pied-a-terre the hinge between a global meritocracy and the megacity? The talented expatriate, poised between staying and going, participates in a kind of dysfunctional marriage with the host city that suspends norms of permanent belonging.

Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate

Providing the first overview of Asia’s emerging biosciences landscape, this timely and important collection brings together ethnographic case studies on biotech endeavors such as genetically modified foods in China, clinical trials in India, blood collection in Singapore and China, and stem-cell research in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. While biotech policies and projects vary by country, the contributors identify a significant trend toward state entrepreneurialism in biotechnology, and they highlight the ways that political thinking and ethical reasoning are converging around the biosciences. As ascendant nations in a region of postcolonial emergence, with an “uncanny surplus” in population and pandemics, Asian countries treat their populations as sources of opportunity and risk. Biotech enterprises are allied to efforts to overcome past humiliations and restore national identity and political ambition, and they are legitimized as solutions to national anxieties about food supplies, diseases, epidemics, and unknown biological crises in the future. Biotechnological responses to perceived risks stir deep feelings about shared fate, and they crystallize new ethical configurations, often re-inscribing traditional beliefs about ethnicity, nation, and race. As many of the essays in this collection illustrate, state involvement in biotech initiatives is driving the emergence of “biosovereignty,” an increasing pressure for state control over biological resources, commercial health products, corporate behavior, and genetic based-identities. Asian Biotech offers much-needed analysis of the interplay among biotechnologies, economic growth, biosecurity, and ethical practices in Asia. Contributors Vincanne Adams Nancy N. Chen Stefan Ecks Kathleen Erwin Phuoc V. Le Jennifer Liu Aihwa Ong Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner Kaushik Sunder Rajan Wen-Ching Sung Charis Thompson Ara Wilson

Muslim feminism: Citizenship in the shelter of corporatist Islam 1

It appears that Muslim feminists the world over are struggling against both Islamic patriarchy and authoritarian governments that are unwilling or unable to grant women social equality. Yet, Malaysia, a developing country in Southeast Asia, seems to be an exception. There, Islam is a patchwork of the most liberal as well as radical strands of Islam, a collage that is represented in cities by Muslim women in full purdah mingling with others in body‐conscious dresses and jeans. This contrast is reflected in the struggle between a small group of feminists called Sisters in Islam and resurgent ulamas over issues of marriage, domesticity, and public life. Feminist groups seek not only to express a female voice in Islam but also to renegotiate a wide range of issues pertaining to Islamic kinship codes, male‐female relations, and citizenship. This paper will argue that local feminism is shaped by the wider structure of state power as the national elite seeks to position itself in relation to global capital.

What Marco Polo Forgot

In 1995, Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on the Grand Canal in Venice, marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Marco Polo’s return to Europe. In 2008, as the world spiraled into a far-reaching financial collapse, a historian warned that in the long haul, “New York could turn into Venice.” These two historical moments set the stage for a discussion of how contemporary Asian art navigates the world of conceptual geography. An anthropology of art expands beyond expertise on “native artifacts” corralled in Western collections to the active interpretation of contemporary art alongside artists, curators, and critics in cosmopolitan spaces of encounter. Drawing on Cai’s exhibition I Want to Believe, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2008, I focus on the contrasting interpretations of Cai’s key installations, that is, the perspectives that dramatize different notions of the global. Is contemporary art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism or an expression of an emerging global civil society? Or should modern Chinese art be viewed as a distinctive kind of anticipatory politics in undoing Western categories of knowledge? In an art of assemblage and juxtaposition, how is China repositioned from an object of Western knowledge to a tool of global intervention?