“A Better Tomorrow”? The Struggle for Global Visibility

Abstract

This paper argues that new publics are being configured by globalization, and that these transnational publics engage state power in a variety of ways. Emerging fields of translocal connection and norm-making in spaces of global visibility are regulated by the power relations of mass media, trade, and financial markets. These ideas are explored through an account of three ethnicized Chinese publics based on the overseas Chinese mass media, as well as the transnational circulation of ethnic Chinese professionals and of Asian capital. These three publics, it is argued, produce new kinds of ethnicized normativities reflecting ambivalences over capitalism, the masculine embodiment of Pacific Rim capital, and assumptions about its global nature that induce particular kinds of subjectivity and citizenship among the diasporic Chinese.