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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 citizenship 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...