Merchants' Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China

Contributors

ix Wing-hoi Chan is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. An anthropologist, Chan focuses on kinship, marriage and their performance aspects in South China, the political contexts of local and transnational ethnic identities, and the politics of representations of the countryside. Recent publications include “Migration and Ethnic Identities in a Mountainous Region: The Case of ‘She Bandits’,” in Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, ed. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F . Siu and Donald S. Sutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); “A Sense of Place in Hong Kong: The Case of Tai O,” in Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population, ed. Helen F . Siu and Agnes Ku (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). Pheng Cheah is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). He is also the co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York; London: Routledge, 2003); and Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book on world literature in an era of global financialization. May-bo Ching is a professor of history and a research fellow of the Centre for Historical Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University. Her major research interest is the social and cultural history of modern China. Her recent publications include Regional Culture and National Identity: The Shaping of “Guangdong Culture” Since the Late Qing (in Chinese; Beijing: Joint Publishing House, 2006), which discusses changes in the articulation of regional identity against the rise of nationalism. Her current projects include a preliminary study of the introduction of natural history drawings and knowledge into China since the late eighteenth century and a social history of Cantonese opera from the 1860s to 1950s. Contributors Siu_00_fm 1/18/11, 10:44 AM 9 x Chi-cheung Choi is a professor in the History Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His major publications include Jiao: Festival and Local Communities in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 2000); and “Competition among Brothers: The Kin Tye Lung Company and Its Associate Companies,” in Rajeswary Brown, ed., Chinese Business Enterprise in Asia (New York; London: Routledge, 1995). Po-king Choi is an associate professor of education administration and policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her areas of interest are education policy and gender studies, Hong Kong culture and identity, and life histories. Her recent publications include: “The Best Students Will Learn English: Ultra-utilitarianism and Linguistic Imperialism in Education in Post-1997 Hong Kong,” in Journal of Education Policy 18, no. 6 (2003): 673–94; “The Politics of Identity: The Women’s Movement in Hong Kong,” in Benjamin Leung, Hong Kong: Legacies and Prospects of Development (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003); and Threads and Needles: Oral Histories of Hong Kong Garment Workers, editor (Hong Kong: Stepforward Multimedia Ltd., 2008). David Faure is a professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He specializes in social and economic history from the Ming dynasty to the Second World War, and the history of Hong Kong. His publications include Colonialism and the Hong Kong Mentality (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, the University of Hong Kong, 2003); A Documentary History of Hong Kong, Vol. 3 Economy (co-editor Pui-tak Lee, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004); China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Liu Zhiwei is a professor of history and the director of the Centre for Historical Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University. His areas of research are Chinese economic and social history of the Ming and Qing periods and studies of popular religion and rural society. His publications include “Lineage on the Sands: The Case of Shawan,” in David Faure and Helen F . Siu, eds., Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), and Between State and Society: Studies of the Household Registration and Taxation Systems in Guangdong in the MingQing periods (in Chinese...