Going with the Flow?: Reflections on Recent Chinese Diaspora Studies

Parker’s review essay begins as an account of two important recent books dealing primarily with Chinese migration to, and diaspora formation in, Australia and Britain, while incorporating other analyses of Chinese diasporas in Latin America and South Asia. In addition, Parker provides an inclusive and carefully interrogative overview of contemporary theories of Chinese diasporic transnationalism and of the need for measured skepticism about the transnational turn in recent migration scholarship. He sketches the “new Chinese migration order” that stems from the interaction of several factors: globalization, China’s opening to trade and migration, the economics of Western higher education, new communications technology, and the regular recalibration of immigration policies in Europe, Australia, and North America. He analyzes the roles played by culture and the intergenerational aspects of collective memory in shaping the identity of Chinese diasporic social formations and touches on issues of spatiality, temporality, and the changing role of China in diasporic identity in the age of the Internet. Parker concludes with an exploration of the shift from an attitude that assumes one “possesses” an identity to a more positional and performative view of identity, while arguing that a certain “banal transnationalism” can miss the implications of Chinese diasporic heterogeneity in social class, social practices, and embodied gender and racial identities.