Constructing and Performing Chineseness

Abstract

The idea of identity is one of the most important organizing principles of modernity—and, certainly, postmodernity. It has provided an overarching conceptual framework to understand larger areas of social life. However, the traditional essentialist concept of identity, which tends to conceive a single aspect of identity as the fundamental essence of an individual’s experience, has come under attack because of its inability to capture the dynamic, processual, and fluid nature of identities. Identities are constituted differently in different historical and social contexts. Identity is always in context. For example, although “Chinese” identity functions as a socially constructed category, it can be argued that it is not a genuine ethnicity. Chineseness is not an inert fact of nature, just like any other racial collectivity, it is not merely there, but is a bundle of ideas that have histories and tradition of thoughts, imageries, and vocabularies that have given it “reality” and presence in and for the West (Said, 1978). Similar to other overseas work on the Chinese diaspora such as Tong and co-author Chan’s (2001b) volume on the Chinese in Thailand, Leung’s (2004) research in Germany, Man’s (2004) work in Canada, Greif’s (1974) and Ip’s (2003) studies in New Zealand, the diasporic Chinese in Australia, like any other Chinese community overseas, are embedded in complex communal relationships constructed along ­divisions of birthplace, language, gender, generation, birth cohort, occupation, and political and religious affiliation. These divisions change in time and space across the life course, carving out dynamic sociocultural spaces for different members of the Chinese diaspora, which in turn form their sometimes common, at other times dissimilar, experiences and self-perceptions.