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Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification Allen Chun New York : SUNY Press , 2017 xii + 284 pp. $95.00 ISBN 978-1-4384-6471-8
Book Reviews
Perhaps the most unique aspect of China is the nearly unanimous belief in its uniqueness. Whether viewed as exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, both insiders and outsiders, patriots and dissidents, so-called panda-huggers and dragon-slayers share a common belief that China is uniquely unique. Allen Chun's new book, Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification is a sophisticated and thought-provoking challenge to this received wisdom, pushing readers to radically reassess many of the most basic concepts through which we talk about China today.
The book is divided into four sections, each developing an analysis of communities that could be broadly classified as "Chinese," moving from Taiwan and Hong Kong to the People's Republic, and finally to Singapore and the Chinese diaspora. Developing parallel studies of each of these related yet also distinct societies, Chun turns conventional analyses of Chineseness on their head by taking culture not as a determining and thus explanatory factor, but rather as a dependent variable, constantly shifting in constructed representations resulting from sociopolitical transformations and geopolitics. Rather than culture shaping politics, economics and social processes, Chun instead shows how these various elements shape and continually reshape the idea of culture.
In the first section on Taiwan, three chapters examine in turn representations of tradition in post-war Taiwan, the role of schools in socialization and indeed nationalization,...