Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

transnational processes that affect large numbers of late-twentieth century subjects (who are geographically “in place” and displaced). Over the past few decades, the multiple and shifting status of “Chineseness” has been formed and embedded within the processes of global capitalism—production, trade, consumption, mobility, and dislocation/relocation—and subjected to various modes of governmentality that fix them in place or disperse them in space.⁴⁶

Indeed, Ong’s goal is constructive, for it embodies the potential to break down the fixity of Chineseness as a category beyond both academic and national discourses on the subject. Ong engaged in this study of diasporic subjects by focusing on the relationship between “China” and them. This focus reveals the potentiality of a term such as Chineseness to facilitate meaning production rather than meaning designation. A minute problem embedded in Ong’s argument stems from her allocating the transforming status of Chineseness to global capitalism. The use of a global structure to describe the relationship between the diasporic subjects and the mother country can easily elide the specificities of the relationship in context. Ong’s approach is definitely useful, but it does not necessarily consider other aspects of this relationship. One possible place where this relationship is constantly reproduced is the space of literature and culture. Rethinking Chineseness introduces culture, through literary texts, as another space in which to problematize Chineseness and examine Sinophone experiences by analyzing representations and practices of Sinophone communities in Singapore and Malaysia.

Let me return to the question of race and ethnicity in order to consider Rey Chow’s analysis of the concept of Chineseness and to examine her call to deconstruct the theoretical misrepresentation of the idea. Chow argued that the myth of Chineseness as a natural and given characteristic in contemporary society is supported by Chinese intellectuals’ eagerness to redress the unequal academic relationship between Western theory and Chinese history. Chow described this reproduction of Chineseness as an essential entity by evaluating its academic and political meanings: