Chun - FORGET CHINESENESS: on the geopolitics of cultural identification

Forget Chineseness

SUNY series in Global Modernity

Arif Dirlik, editor

On the Geopolitics of
Cultural Identification

Allen Chun

Cover image: Nagee, used with permission

The cartoon, by the artist Nagee, depicts the singer Chou Tzu-yu, who delivered a formal apology in early 2016 for waving the flag of Taiwan while performing on a South Korean television show. The words above the picture say, Sorry, Ive been Chinesed. Today, its Chou Tzu-yu. Tomorrow, it will be you. It is deliberately written in passive tense (literally: I was sorried, I was made to be Chinese), which is not even proper Chinese but corresponds to the forced, hostage-like nature of the illustration.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2017 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chun, Allen John Uck Lun, 1952 author.

Title: Forget Chineseness : on the geopolitics of cultural identification / by Allen Chun.

Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: SUNY series in global modernity | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016031420 (print) | LCCN 2016059728 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464718 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464732 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Chinese diaspora. | ChineseForeign countriesEthnic identity. | ChineseEthnic identity. | National characteristics, Chinese.

Classification: LCC DS732 .C595 2017 (print) | LCC DS732 (ebook) | DDC 305.800951dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031420

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Contents

Postwar, Post-Republican Taiwan:
Civilizational Mythologies in the Politics of the Unreal

Chineseness, Literarily Speaking:
The Burden of Tradition in the Making of Modernity

The Moral Cultivation of Citizenship as
Acculturating and Socializing Regime

The Coming Crisis of Multiculturalism:
When the Imagined Community Hits the Fan

Hong Kong Betwixt and Between:
The Liminality of Culture Before the End of History

Hong Kong before Hong Kongness:
The Changing Genealogies and Faces of Colonialism

Critical Cosmopolitanism in the Birth of
Hong Kong Place-Based Identity

Hong Kongs Embrace of the Motherland:
Economy and Culture as Fictive Commodities

The Reclamation of National Destiny:
On the Unbearable Heaviness of Identity

From the Ashes of Socialist Humanism:
The Myth of Guanxi Exceptionalism in the PRC

A New Greater China:
The Demise of Transnationalism and Other Great White Hopes

Confucius, Incorporated:
The Advent of Capitalism with PRC Characteristics

Who Wants to Be Diasporic?
The Fictions and Facts of Critical Ethnic Subjectivity

The Yellow Pacific:
Diasporas of Mind in the Politics of Caste Consciousness

Ethnicity in the Prison House of the Modern Nation:
The State in Singapore as Exception

The Postcolonial Alien in Us All:
Asian Studies in the International Division of Labor

Preface

Ethnicity as Culture as Identity: Unpacking the Crisis of Culture in Culturalism

This book is in part a follow-up to a paper published in 1996, titled Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity. At the same time, it is a reply to many queries by scholars over the years who were unsettled by aspects of that argument (including students who offered to write a sequel to it) and my repeated tendency to decline invitations to elaborate on the topic. I suspect that most of the commotion was caused by the obscene title, in which case I would add that it has probably led to many misreadings of the essay. The real subject matter was reflected in the subtitle, which had less to do with Chineseness per se than with muddles in the model involved, when sinologists and social scientists alike transform culture into culturalism. Thus to answer the obvious question, what does Chineseness say about China?, I would say little, at face value. China has been changing, perhaps sui generis, and notions of Chineseness have correspondingly changed as the subtle frame through which actors and institutions ideologically validate their ongoing existence. The same can be said about the various culturalist models that scholars deploy to make sense of China or any other society; they validate in the first instance the disciplinary mindset that inherently governs it.

In the same year, I presented essentially the same argument, albeit directed to a cultural studies or social theory audience, in an essay titled Discourses of Identity in the Changing Spaces of Public Culture in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Culturalism, of which Chineseness is a particular discursive representation, is less a social fact sui generis than a crisis invoked not necessarily by the inherent nature of culture but by situations of context. In other words, its imperative resides in essence outside culture. The fact that culture can be codified, systematized, regulated, and even commoditized in ways that are contrary to the spirit of lived experience is in short the source of many crises of modernity, ranging from conflicts pertaining to national identity, inventions of tradition, hegemonies of state, and the domination of culture industries, including mass media. Chineseness has thus been constructed in complex ways in diverse societies, the least of which is from the people themselves. While it is possible and desirable to interrogate Chineseness, one cannot do so without at the same time asking who is speaking for whom and toward what ends? There are also places where Chineseness (and its variants) has been so politicized that one can question whether its discursive manifestation and propagation really has anything to do with culture. Alternatively, one can look at the question in political terms too and ask, is it really necessary to culturalize at all? The content of Chineseness is less seminal than its form and function. On the other hand, it is possible to problematize Chineseness; to demystify, reinscribe, even engender and queer it. But explorations of alternative meanings as cultural critique have not been my primary concern. In the meantime, the ambiguity of ethnicity as culture as identity continues to be a problem endemic to social sciences, which I have elaborated on separately.

In short, this book is no longer about the ambiguities of ethnicity as culture as identity in a Chinese context but rather an effort to transcend such literal discussions of Chineseness and situate them within their respective historical contexts and underlying geopolitical formative processes. To problematize Chineseness as constitutive of an ongoing historical framework, from a comparative perspective and within a transnational or glocal context, serves to problematize the nature of contexts that invoke Chineseness as an ethnic or cultural problem, among other things. In the long run, Chineseness is just a superficial reflection of cultures embeddness or ongoing entanglement with more complex social institutional processes, such as modernity, colonialism, nation-state formation and globalization. A deeper probe into such institutions as processes per se should in turn offer a more nuanced articulation of culturality.