Contesting British Chinese Culture

This is the first text to address British Chinese culture. It explores British Chinese cultural politics in terms of national and international debates on the Chinese diaspora, race, multiculture, identity and belonging, and transnational ‘Chineseness’. Collectively, the essays look at how notions of ‘British Chinese culture’ have been constructed and challenged in the visual arts, theatre and performance, and film, since the mid-1980s. They contest British Chinese invisibility, showing how practice is not only heterogeneous, but is forged through shifting historical and political contexts; continued racialization, the currency of Orientalist stereotypes and the possibility of their subversion; the policies of institutions and their funding strategies; and dynamic relationships with transnationalisms. The book brings a fresh perspective that makes both an empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of race and cultural production, whilst critically interrogating the very notion of British Chineseness.

Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international relations that support or undermine different instances of Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic, fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and represent themselves vis-à-vis the local, regional, and global in their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular culture, and international relations. “The Chinese overseas often saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has ever been what it seems.” Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore. “By including reflections on constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept, while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century.” Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University.

This book examines the artistic practices of a range of British-based artists of East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese) heritage to consider the social, political and cultural effects of migration or diaspora on their creative production. Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk demonstrates three themes: the multiplicity and expansive contemporaneity of these artists’ visual oeuvres; the physical impact or interpretation of migratory circumstances on their artistic practices; and the necessity to continue to evolve ways of thinking about migration, race and border crossings in the current political climate of the 21st century. The book will be of interest to scholars studying art history, Asian studies, British studies, migration and diaspora studies, and cultural studies.

Analysis of the experiences and changing idientities of young Chinese people in Britain

An emerging interest in a British East and Southeast Asian identity after decades of political and social exclusion has coincided with periods of economic and political challenges in the UK. In Migration and Identity in British East and Southeast Asian Cinema, Leung Wing-Fai argues that this explosive context has created rich and diverse forms of storytelling and an accented cinematic language. By offering close readings of key contemporary films and positioning them in a wider slate of releases by British East and Southeast Asian filmmakers alongside Anglophone film histories in the Global North, this book sheds light on a developing field and engenders new ways of understanding British cinema and society. The author explores changing representational politics in contemporary cinema and argues for the cinematic visibility of a hitherto silenced community. Drawing on theoretical frames from sociological, film and cultural studies to critically engage with the textual and visual language of the case studies, Leung claims the place of British East and Southeast Asian Cinema as a film and cultural movement. Highlighting diversity among the British East and Southeast Asian community, pushing boundaries in its intersectional approach to ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality, and proposing a critical framework for academic studies on diasporic film-making in the UK, this nuanced and innovative study will interest researchers, teachers and students in a range of Humanities and Liberal Arts subjects, including Film and Media Studies, Regional/Area Studies (Asia), and arts, cultural and creative productions from the East and Southeast Asian diaspora.

First collection of full-length plays from British East Asian playwrights Playwrights: Yang Mai Ooi, Jeremy Tiang, Lucy Chai Lai-Tuen, Amy Ng, Stephen Hoo, Joel Tan and Daniel York Loh. Selected and Edited: Cheryl Robson, Dr Amanda Rogers and Dr Ashley Thorpe. With an introduction: Dr Amanda Rogers and Dr Ashley Thorpe A landmark collection of contemporary full-length plays by British East Asian writers. Exploring subjects such as cultural identity, the fragmentation of communities, tradition, invisibility and discrimination, these plays are ideal to perform. With an introduction by academics Dr Amanda Rogers and Dr Ashley Thorpe which sets the plays into context and explores the hidden history of theatre from BEA theatre-makers. This is a timely collection, being published within months of the opening of three plays by British East Asian playwrights in the UK, and a growing awareness in the mainstream press that that East Asians in British theatre are under-represented. As Daniel York Loh writes: “British East Asians were effectively side-lined in any debate on diversity in theatre where the general establishment view tends towards a binary black/white... which seems to exclude large swathes of the Asian continent.” As Kumiko Mendl of Yellow Earth theatre writes: "There is an abundance of talent and experience to be found in the UK, and it's time that the rest of Britain woke up to the diversity of artists and practitioners around them – those that know their Kuan Han-ching as well as their Shakespeare." The seven plays in the anthology are: Bound Feet Blues by Yang Mai Ooi The Last Days of Limehouse by Jeremy Tiang Conversations with my Unknown Mother by Lucy Chai Lai-Tuen Special Occasions by Amy Ng Jamaica Boy by Stephen Hoo Tango by Joel Tan The Fu Manchu Complex by Daniel York Loh "Ooi has some unsettling examples of how, even today in the West, daintiness in a woman is often celebrated and a `beauty is pain' culture still exists." --The Stage "The Last Days of Limehouse is a finely balanced, well-written and superbly acted play that's well worth seeing." **** - --everything theatre "...a devilishly ironic spin on Sax Rohmer's classic novel that will leave you in hysterics...wildly satirical and steeped in sexual innuendo... the atmosphere created on stage is alluring." - --The Upcoming

This timely collection focuses on domestic and international education research on race and ethnicity. As co-conveners of the British Education Research Associations (BERA) Special Education Group on Race and Ethnicity (2010-2013), Race and Lander are advocates for the promotion of race and ethnicity within education. With its unique structure and organisation of empirical material, this volume collates contributions from global specialists and fresh new voices to bring cutting-edge research and findings to a multi-disciplinary marker which includes education, sociology and political studies. The aim of this book is to promote and advocate a range of contemporary issues related to race, ethnicity and inclusion in relation to pedagogy, teaching and learning.

This study reviews developments in the ethnic and national identity of the descendants of migrants, taking ethnic Chinese as a case study. Our core question is why, in spite of debates worldwide about identity, exclusion and rights, do minority communities continue to suffer discrimination and attacks? This question is asked in view of the growing incidence in recent years of ‘racial’ conflicts between majority and minority communities and among minorities, in both developed and developing countries. The study examines national identity from the perspective of migrants’ descendants, whose national identity may be more rooted than is often thought. Concepts such as ‘new ethnicities’, ‘cultural fluidity’, and ‘new’ and ‘multiple’ identities feature in this examination. These concepts highlight identity changes across generations and the need to challenge and reinterpret the meaning of ‘nation’ and to review problems with policy initiatives designed to promote nation-building in multi-ethnic societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.