Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (review)

Abstract

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. AIHWA ONG. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999; 322 pp. Reviewed by JOHN TOFIK KARAM Syracuse University Aihwa Ong's Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality intensifies the decadelong rebirth of diaspora and transnational studies with provocative and far-reaching insights. Grappling with the meanings of in late capitalism, Ong coins the term flexible citizenship to refer to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions (p. 6). Far from being constructed only out of the identity politics or agency enacted by Chinese subjects, these cultural logics and interrelated economic rationalities are shaped by the nation-state, the market, and the family. Drawing on the Foucaultian notion of governmentality, Ong argues that Chinese subjects' flexible citizenship is constituted by these interrelated regimes in the contemporary world. The three regimes, however, do not weigh equally. Global capitalism, above all, is emphasized as the force majeur in processes of subject formation. Such attentiveness to the global market's own peculiar subjectifying processes not only serves as a creative (albeit not unproblematic) combination of Marx and Foucault. It is also the battering-ram of Ong's larger politicalintellectual aim to reorient discussions of Chinese subjects vis i vis the new discourses and representations of belonging that are emerging in tandem with transnational Asian capitalism the world over. Ethnographically, these abstract aims and ideas are grounded in detailed and hard-nosed observations of states, peoples, images, and capital in motion. Conventionally viewed in terms of essential differences on both sides of the Pacific-East vs. West, Collectivism vs. Individualism, Tradition vs. Modernity-Ong suggests throughout her book that Chinese and American nation-states govern subjects amidst the same neoliberal forces of the world economy. In opening its economic borders, the Chinese state seeks to attract overseas Chinese subjects through refashioning Confucian ideals and guanxi particularist relations as naturalized mechanisms to incorporate and regulate these capital-wielding diasporans within the notion of a modern Chinese essence. Having been scorned by the mainland in the past, overseas Chinese businessmen are now being heralded as potential harbingers of modernity, adding wings to the tiger (p. 44). Equally eager to tap into the power of Pacific Rim capital, Western business analysts and state powers also join the chorus of Confucian eulogizing. Not only have U.S. immigration laws made it easier for wealthy Asians to move to the United States, but American-based scholars proclaim that `Confucian humanism' will create `an Oriental alternative' to the destructive instrumental rationality and individualism of the West (p. …