Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, the book investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sylvia Ang is Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University. Her research with migrants in and from Asia is interested in the production and experiences of difference and inequalities, with a focus on ethnic relations, class, gender and post/decoloniality. She has published in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Mobilities, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among others. Her monograph Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese migrants (2022) was recently published with Amsterdam University Press.

Fran Martin is Associate Professor and Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. She recently concluded a 5-year ARC Future Fellowship project on the social and subjective experiences of young women from China studying and living in Australia, whose findings have been published in Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke U.P. 2022). Fran’s prior research has focussed on television, film, literature and other forms of cultural production in contemporary transnational China (The People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), with a specialization in cultures of gender and sexuality. In addition to Dreams of Flight (Duke U.P, 2022), she is the author of Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film, and Public Culture (HK U.P., 2003); Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke U.P. 2010); and Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (with Tania Lewis and Wanning Sun, Duke U.P. 2016). Her co-edited books include AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (with Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland and Audrey Yue, Illinois U.P. 2008); Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures (with L.N. Heinrich, Hawaii U.P. 2006); and Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (with Chris Berry and Audrey Yue, Duke U.P. 2003).

Ien Ang is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, of which she was the founding director until 2014. She gained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Ien’s internationally acclaimed books include Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (1985), Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991) and On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (2001). She has also been the co-author or co-editor of a number of books focusing on Australian multiculturalism and Asian-Australian cultural politics, including Alter-Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture (2000), The SBS Story (2008) and The Art of Engagement: Culture, Collaboration, Innovation (2011). Her most recent, co-authored book focuses on the contemporary transformations in Sydney’s Chinatown and is entitled Chinatown Unbound: Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China (2011).

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.