CompleteMartialArts.com - Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality
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Manufacturer: Duke University Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.482
EAN: 9780822322696
ISBN: 0822322692
Label: Duke University Press
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 1998
Publisher: Duke University Press
Studio: Duke University Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalization. Are nation-states being transformed by globalization into a single globalized economy? Do global cultural forces herald a postnational millennium? Tying ethnography to structural analysis, Flexible Citizenship explores such questions with a focus on the links between the cultural logics of human action and on economic and political processes within the Asia-Pacific, including the impact of these forces on women and family life.
Explaining how intensified travel, communications, and mass media have created a transnational Chinese public, Aihwa Ong argues that previous studies have mistakenly viewed transnationality as necessarily detrimental to the nation-state and have ignored individual agency in the large-scale flow of people, images, and cultural forces across borders. She describes how political upheavals and global markets have induced Asian investors, in particular, to blend strategies of migration and of capital accumulation and how these transnational subjects have come to symbolize both the fluidity of capital and the tension between national and personal identities. Refuting claims about the end of the nation-state and about “the clash of civilizations,” Ong presents a clear account of the cultural logics of globalization and an incisive contribution to the anthropology of Asia-Pacific modernity and its links to global social change.
This pioneering investigation of transnational cultural forms will appeal to those in anthropology, globalization studies, postcolonial studies, history, Asian studies, Marxist theory, and cultural studies.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: A powerful examination of patterns of transnationality in the Pacific Rim
Comment: Aihwa Ong uses the example of the international (and now transnational) diaspora of "guoqiao" or overseas Chinese to look at the construction of flexable citizenships. These communities, she argues, increasingly construct their cultural identities through a pramatic assesment of the best strategies of advancement, irregardless of national place. In this way, Hong Kong capital has been key to the transformation of mainland China, Malaysian Chinese send their "parachute" kids to America for education, and the Singapore leadership brings in Harvard professors to help them construct an alternative modernity centered on conceptions of Confucianism.
She addresses the ways in which race can still form a glass celing, even when transnationals have all the right cultural capital, and the way "traditional" gender roles are reestablished to meet the need of the (male) transnational class to have a (female) foundation in one place. She also discusses the ways in which the advanced agency of the transnational class is dependant on a much more restricted class of people.
Although some of Ong's conclusions demand reconsideration in light of the Financial Crisis of '97, the return of Hong Kong and the events of 9/11, and although her tone occasionally waxes chauvainistic, much of her analysis still rings true.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very important work
Comment: This is a great book. Much more thoughtful than most of the more fashionable post-colonial or globalization writers. Ong demonstrates how the Chinese transnational community confounds notions of peripheral non-westerners, or transnational community as weapon of the weak. She also demonstrates how the contemporary world is creating the context for the rise of China. The ultimate antidote to babble about how we have moved into a world beyond identities and geopolitics.
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Summary: Brilliant analysis of globalization within anthropology
Comment: A must read for anthropologists and other social scientists interested in the process of globalization.
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