Events

This workshop investigates the transformation of Chinese Voluntary Associations (CVAs, Huaren Shetuan) in contemporary Southeast Asia. CVAs refer to “associations that originate out of the Chinese migrant communities and are controlled by them, hence not official and non- governmental” (Kuah-Pearce and Hu-dehart, 2006), and can take on various forms such as surname organizations, hometown affiliations, chambers of commerce, dialect groups and religious associations. This project interrogates how CVAs (re)construct themselves and forge new processes of transnationalization and localization amidst the shifting dynamics in domestic environments and changing China-Southeast Asia relationships while China rises as a global superpower.

CVAs, along with Chinese schools and Chinese media, have been called one of the ‘three pillars’ of Chinese societies, have played pivotal roles in Chinese diasporic communities, particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries when these communities were growing, consolidating, and negotiating their position in the social fabric of colonial and post-colonial nation states in Southeast Asia. Increasingly viewed as shrinking and antiquated social institutions, CVAs in Southeast Asia are, in fact, undergoing complex, multi-dimensional changes, driven by many internal and external forces. Although not yet the subject of major academic investigation, these contemporary changes are significant and would offer fresh insights into the reconfiguration of ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia as well as their renewed transnational connections with China in the contemporary era. Broadly speaking, this project attempts to provide an updated investigation of CVAs in the context of China’s rise and shifting China-Southeast Asia relationships. More specifically, it aims to make four key contributions to the scholarships on CVAs, Chinese diaspora and China-Southeast Asia relationship:

• To create a platform for the first interdisciplinary, multi-sited and longitudinal investigation of CVAs in Southeast This is to bring multidisciplinary researchers into dialogue with each other to expand knowledge and enlarge the research spectrum of the field in an updated and informed manner.
• To develop a theoretical agenda in the study of CVAs by conceptualizing the transformation of CVAs from the perspective of ancestral communities.
• To foreground an embodied, affective and everyday perspective to understand Chinese influence on diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.
• To understand efforts to forge local, regional, and transnational inter-Asian connections within the framework of Chinese diaspora communities by adopting multiple frames of reference in the understanding of Asian subjectivity.

REGISTRATION

This workshop is by invitation only. For further enquiries, please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Prof Kenneth DEAN
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

Dr Guan Thye HUE
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore