NEW BOOK - China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) [25.03.2009]
China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces (Hong Kong UP, 2009)
China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces is a pioneering work which brings together accounts of the journey and cross-cultural experiences of Chinese travelers in the late nineteenth century with those of more recent migrants and diasporic Chinese subjects in a number of global locations including twentieth-century Hong Kong. The book seeks to address how movements across cultures shape the different ways in which China and Chineseness have been imagined and represented since the beginning of the last century. In so doing, it aims to offer an overview of the debate about Chineseness as it has emerged in different global locations.
Through a variety of primary sources in different media, the individual essays discuss different approaches to the nation-diaspora paradigm. Set against the representations of this paradigm is the broader backdrop of the history of an "abroad" shaped by the actual encounter between Chinese and non-Chinese forces, by the transplantation of people, money, labor, and ideas, by frustration and exploitation, and by the ever present attempt to transcend a hierarchy of unequal ethnicities, cultures, and languages to full participatory, polyphonic equality. The collection coheres through its focus on the common interest in "China Abroad" but it is also of particular interest through the variety of critical approaches it adopts.
The collection will be of interest to literary and cultural studies scholars, historians, and sociologists with an interest in twentieth-century and current cross-cultural issues and, specifically, China-West Studies. It features a Foreword by Rey Chow, and essays by AASRN members Deborah Madsen and Tseen Khoo.
Elaine Yee Lin Ho is associate professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She has published book monographs on Timothy Mo (2000) and Anita Desai (2006), and many articles on anglophone world literatures and Hong Kong film, literature, and culture. Her current research interest is in literature and literary cultures at the intersections of Hong Kong, mainland China, and the West.
Julia Kuehn is assistant professor in English at the University of Hong Kong, where her research and teaching interests are in nineteenth-century literature and travel writing. Her publications include Glorious Vulgarity: Marie Corelli's Feminine Sublime in a Popular Context (2004), and the co-edited collections A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (2007) and Travel Writing, Form and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (2008).