Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

Australian cultural theorist Ien Ang critiqued this conflation of ethnic, racial, and national identities as the source of a false identification for the Chinese diasporic subjects:

The idea of being part of a race produces a sense of belonging based on naturalized and fictive notions of kinship and heredity; in Chinese discourse, of course, this is eminently represented by the enduring myth of the unity of the Chinese people as children of the Yellow Emperor. What Rey Chow calls the “myth of consanguinity” has very real effects on the self-conception of diasporic subjects, as it provides them with a magical solution to the sense of dislocation and rootlessness that many of them experience in their lives.²⁰

The “quick-fix” approach to one’s ethnic and cultural identity is a proliferation of this myth of consanguinity that overlooks other aspects of the self-conception and the local realities of the diasporic subjects. By adopting this approach, the individual ends up reinforcing the meaning of Chineseness, instead of actively constructing a narrative within the discourse of Chinese identity, in order to facilitate his or her process of self-conception. Ang’s argument guides one into the contemporary debate of Chineseness.

From Overseas Chinese to Chinese Diaspora…

Difference, like representation, is also a slippery, and therefore, contested concept. There is the “difference” which makes a radical and unbridgeable separation: and there is a “difference” which is positional, conditional and conjunctural.… We still have a great deal of work to do to decouple ethnicity, as it functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with nationalism, imperialism, racism and the state.…
What is involved is the splitting of the notion of ethnicity between, on the one hand the dominant notion which connects it to nation and “race” and on the other hand what I think is the beginning