Allen Chun

From Nationalism to Nationalizing: Cultural Imagination and State Formation in Postwar Taiwan

The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs is carrying a seres of major papers on the meaning and ramifications of Chinese nationalism. The contnbutors thus far have been Wang Gungwu (issue 23), James Townsend (issue 27), Lucian Pye (issue 29), and Prasenjit Duara (issue 30). Below, in a paper direty relevant to the broader questions of modem-day Chinese nationalism, the anthrpologist Allen Chun analyses how nationalist concepts have been reshaped and propagated in Taiwan.

Pariah capitalism and the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia: Problems in the definition of the problem

(1989). Pariah capitalism and the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia: Problems in the definition of the problem. Ethnic and Racial Studies: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 233-256.

The Lineage-Village Complex in Southeastern China: A Long Footnote in the Anthropology of Kinship [and Comments and Reply]

The A. attempts to evaluate the current litterature on descent and lineage organization in China and its significance for anthropological discussions of kinship theory. Despite increasing anthropological skepticism over the applicability of lineage theory and the corresponding decline of interest in unilineal descent, the existence of lineage organizations has been an unchallenged fact for anthropologists and historians of China, in turn offering explicit support for lineage theory. Recent historical research has shed light on the diversity of Chinese kin organization over time and space for the most part without questioning the model itself. While the A. does not contest the existence of lineages in China, he argues that the historical conditions of their evolution squarely contradict the theoretical principles upon which lineage theory has been constructed

The Postcolonial Alien in Us All: Identity in the Global Division of Intellectual Labor

Identity politics has accented the primacy of subjectivity of all kinds. I deflate the importance of identity in the short term here, as a preamble for arguing that our identities have always been fictions that are shaped by underlying institutional forces; that is, contrary to what we think, these identities can change and are stratified less by the ethnocentrism in our concepts than our institutional situatedness.

Diasporas of Mind, Or Why There Aint No Black Atlantic in Cultural China

The concept of cultural China, which has attempted to champion diasporic values in the construction of new Chinese identities, resembles the cosmopolitanism of Black Atlantic, which has become Paul Gilroys paradigm of counter-modernity, both through its appeal to hybridity and the emancipatory power of culture. Despite superficial similarities between these two concepts, the utility of diaspora here resides less in its ability to invoke ethnic realities than its particular situatedness within a field of socio-political relations. On the one hand, while Chinese, black and other diasporas differ by reference to their situatedness to a local socio-political ground, they expose on the other hand the general limitations of diaspora as a phenomenon engendered by the rigid peculiarities of an increasingly anachronistic stratified society.

On the Geopolitics of Identity

The trope of identity has served in recent decades as a powerful construct in literary criticism, cultural studies, history, race and gender studies, invoking in turn identity politics of various genres. Despite its seemingly interdisciplinary usages and broad theoretical ramifications, the concept of identity has been conditioned by semantically flawed usages and provincial disciplinary assumptions, which have not only reified myopic fields and positions but also influenced the way we understand its presumed relevance to social relations and concrete institutional practices. I argue first of all that ethnicity, culture and identity are analytically distinct notions whose meaning and usage have been muddled in disciplinary practice. Identity’s relationship to ethnicity in particular is tied less to the putative existence of groups (or an assumed sameness) than to a notion of subjectivity that must be seen in the context of evolving social and political forces. These forces are more complexly nuanced than the way they have been used by theories of social construction or Bourdieuan practice prevalent in the literature. In sum, the pragmatics of identity is less a political contestation per se over ethnicity and culture than abstract struggles within these geopolitical processes.

'GOVERN-MENTALITY' TRANSITION: HONG KONG AS IMPERIAL OBJECT AND SUBJECT

This paper attempts to examine the colonial experience of Hong Kong as a function of the historicity of British imperial rule, whose ideology and practice can be contrasted with experiences in other places (India, Oceania, Africa, etc.) as well as other times and where the changing nature of colonial governmentality can be seen to be influenced by the concurrent emergence of the state, modernity and commoditization.

The Institutional Unconscious; or, The Prison House of Academia

In this era of late modernity, it appears that academia has evolved to a stage where one might question whether its institutional practices and everyday regimes have actually produced a significant advancement in ‘‘knowledge.’’ The underside of what Stanley Aronowitz once called ‘‘the last good job in America’’ is what others, in a very different prise de conscience, have called ‘‘the academic sweatshop,’’ ‘‘academic apartheid,’’ and ‘‘the new internal colonialism.’’ 1 While anthropologists in particular have be-

Writing theory Steps toward an ecology of practice

Those of us in the ‘social sciences’ who take theory ‘seriously’ have been taught to treat ideas as ideas. The history of theory is thus the history of ideas as they have evolved from or in contradistinction to other ideas. Some disciplines even have ‘classical’ theory, a wellspring of concepts and frames of mind that have served to produce more contemporary ones. Theory may be seen as a special form of discourse in the sense that most authors appear to attach a certain degree of belief in the factual content of theory or theoretical explanation. At least, I do not know anyone who takes his theory seriously who would at the same time admit that it is a deliberate fiction or imagined narrative. On the contrary, I wish to argue that theories in the first instance are precisely that: imagined relations that are grounded in mindsets and experiences, which are socially and historically constituted. Moreover, I argue that these mindsets and experiences are unconsciously constituted in the context of changing institutions that have directly conditioned the subjectivity of theorists as agents. Academics in particular like to think that their writing is ‘free’ from strictures that define its form or content. I think this is an illusion that has ramifications, most of all for ‘theory’.

Other 'routes': the critical challenge for Asian academia

This special issue on Asian academia(s) is an exploratory investigation into speci® c dilemma(s) faced by intellectuals in Asia not only in the advancement of social theory and critical knowledge but more importantly within the con® nes of institutional and political regimes that de® ne modes of knowledge production, regulate social reproduction within the system and entangle knowledge itself into webs of societal relevance. No academia in the world is an ivory tower, yet we seem to think that such an ideal exists or is possible. Intellectual histories are written as though thought can be read and understood in its own terms. The accumulation of knowledge is seen largely as an intellectual project, as though it is immune to the disciplinary pressures of the system, priorities of funding, the rule of bureaucracy and demands of political correctness, all of which shape the way we produce, package and disseminate our work, even as everyday routine. On the contrary, no understanding of academia can be complete without seeing how it is embedded within the institutional, political and ideological forces that regulate it. Nor can any understanding of the possibilities of critical knowledge in Asia be complete without deconstructing and recon® guring the various power relationships that entangle academia to the larger institutional± political context. Lastly, Asian academia is not only the product of local forces but also global ones as well. However, this dialectical interplay between local and global is different in different places and is not, if anything, well understood at present. The idea that `native’ scholars (as opposed to those in the metropole) are, in essence, local scholars pursuing local studies is a myth perpetrated in the West and reinforced by the prejudices of a global division of labour. Most if not all academics in Asia are Western trained, directly or indirectly. The university and the standards upon which it is based may coexist with traditional scholarship in non-Western countries, but the institutional forms that cultivate knowledge have long been modern. The postcolonial acknowledgement of the contribution of `diasporic’ intellectuals in the West seems to reinforce the notion that `once an ethnic, always an ethnic’. Scholars working in their country of indigenous origin should be even more `native’, if not nativistic. Yet one often neglects to point out that those Asians who have gone abroad to pursue advanced degrees in the West tend not to be a representative sample of all Asian students. Many of those who studied then remained in the West to teach literature, history and other ® elds of Asian studies, tended to have backgrounds in Western literature and history prior to going abroad, and thus they dif-