Forget Chineseness : on the geopolitics of cultural identification / Allen Chun.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Postwar, post-republican Taiwan: civilizational mythologies in the politics of the unreal -- Chineseness, literarily speaking: the burden of tradition in the making of modernity -- The moral cultivation of citizenship as acculturating and socializing regime -- The coming crisis of multiculturalism: when the imagined community hits the fan -- Hong Kong betwixt and between: the liminality of culture before the end of history -- Hong Kong before Hong Kongness: the changing genealogies and faces of colonialism -- Critical cosmopolitanism in the birth of Hong Kong place-based "identity" -- Hong Kong's embrace of the motherland: economy and culture as fictive commodities -- The reclamation of national destiny: on the unbearable heaviness of identity -- From the ashes of socialist humanism: the myth of Guanxi exceptionalism in the PRC -- A new greater China: the demise of transnationalism and other great white hopes -- Confucius, incorporated: the advent of capitalism with PRC characteristics -- Who wants to be diasporic? The fictions and facts of critical ethnic subjectivity -- The yellow Pacific: diasporas of mind in the politics of caste consciousness -- Ethnicity in the prisonhouse of the modern nation: the state in Singapore as exception -- The postcolonial alien in us all: Asian studies in the international division of labor -- Afterword.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

Forget Chineseness provides a critical interpretation of not only discourses of Chinese identity - Chineseness - but also of how they have reflected differences between "Chinese" societies, such as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, People's Republic of China, Singapore, and communities overseas. Allen Chun asserts that while identity does have meaning in cultural, representational terms, it is more importantly a product of its embeddedness in specific entanglements of modernity, colonialism, nation-state formation, and globalization. By articulating these processes underlying institutional practices in relation to public mindsets, it is possible to explain various epistemic moments that form the basis for their sociopolitical transformation. From a broader perspective, this should have salient ramifications for prevailing discussions of identity politics. The concept of identity has not only been predicated on flawed notions of ethnicity and culture in the social sciences but it has also been acutely exacerbated by polarizing assumptions that drive our understanding of identity politics.

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