Flexible Citizenship

Flexible Citizenship

The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

  • Autor: Ong, Aihwa
  • Editor: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822322504
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822396772
  • Lloc de publicació:  Durham , United States
  • Any de publicació digital: 2012
  • Mes: Juny
  • Pàgines: 336
  • DDC: 303.48/2
  • Idioma: Anglés
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.


  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality
    • Approaches to Transnational Flows and Diasporas
    • Rethinking the Cultural Logics of Globalization
  • Part 1: Emerging Modernities
    • 1. The Geopolitics of Cultural Knowledge
      • Anthropological Authority and the New World Disorder
      • China’s Embrace of the Authoritarian Asian Model
      • Plunging into the Ocean, Bridging Nations
      • Modernity without Deracination
      • Conclusion
    • 2. A "Momentary Glow of Fraternity"
      • The Reemergence of Race in the Chinese Nation
      • "The Glow of Chinese Fraternity"
      • Hierarchical Moral Economies: Hard versus Soft Societies
      • Modernity and Orientalism: Spiritual Difference from the West
      • Stitching Together Disjunctures at Home
      • Conclusion: A Momentary Glow?
  • Part 2: Regimes and Strategies
    • 3. Fengshui and the Limits to Cultural Accumulation
      • Different Forms of Capital
      • Strategies of Accumulation and Mobility
      • The Politics of Location: Restructuring the Ethnic Landscape
      • Cultural Competence in the Polyethnic City
      • Conclusion
    • 4. The Pacific Shuttle: Family Citizenship, and Capital Circuits
      • Destabilizing Chineseness
      • Middling Modernity: Guanxi and Family Regimes in Diaspora
      • English Weather: National Character and Biopolitics
      • China Recalls Prodigal Sons
      • Plotting Family Itineraries
      • Families in America, Fathers in Midair
      • American Liberalism and Pacific Rim Capital
      • Narrating Cosmopolitan Citizenship
      • Conclusion
  • Part 3: Translocal Publics
    • 5. The Family Romance of Mandarin Capital
      • Cosmopolitics and the Subaltern Unconscious
      • The Governmentality of Family Romances
      • The Romance of Family Empires
      • Cross-Ethnic and Cross-National Fraternities
      • The Family Romance of the State
      • Working Women’s Dreams of Traveling Romance
      • Conclusion
    • 6. "A Better Tomorrow"? The Struggle for Global Visibility
      • "Soap Operas without Borders"
      • The Global Arrival of Asian Professionals
      • The Asian Face of Globalization
      • Conclusion
  • Part 4: Global Futures
    • 7. Saying No to the West: Liberal Reasoning in Asia
      • China as Evil Empire
      • Huntington’s Taxonomy: Revisiting Orientalism
      • Liberalisms: Individual Liberty or Governmentality?
      • Nay-Saying and Postdevelopmental Strategy
      • Governmentality: "The Caring Society"
      • Variations in Western Neoliberalism
      • Conclusion
    • 8. Zones of New Sovereignty
      • Rezoning Sovereignty
      • The New Islam as Corporate Normativity
      • "Civilizational Dialogue" and Internal Colonies
      • Seedbeds of Counterpublics?
      • Conclusion
  • Afterword: An Anthropology of Transnationality
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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