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Abstract

This dissertation investigates some critical issues in the formation of the cultural identity of the Nanyang or Southeast Asian Chinese through analyzing cultural space of and in the Nanyang.

First of all, this thesis establishes the late 19th century as the formative era for the cultural identities of the ethnic community. The existing scholarship treats early period of the post-World War II (1950s-1960s) as the formative period of Southeast Asian Chinese identity. Before this period, the identity of Chinese in this region was taken for granted to be Huaqiao, which means overseas Chinese loyal to China and attached to China without their own subjectivity. This assumption leaves out the evidence of a developing sense of subjectivity and diverse natures of many locally formed Chinese communities in the region without reasonable explanation. This dissertation argues that the subjectivity of Nanyang Chinese was formed when they were named and controlled by different agencies during late Qing.

Secondly, the thesis argues that the Chinese travelers ( literati, merchants, military officers, political activists, monks, etc) not only perceived and observed but participated in the formation of the cultural identities of the ethnic community, thus made the process more complex since the “Self”was mixed with the “Other” in the development. From the mid-1800s to the 1920s, more and more Chinese emigrated from China to Nanyang. At the same time, numerous Chinese travelers accompanying with this largest mass Chinese immigration wave, came to the Nanyang region for business, religious,political, educational, journalist and literary purposes. Their perception of the Nanyang was shaped by the literature of various types about the space they read prior to the journey, which they found later quite different from the ground reality. Different from non-Chinese travelers of the time who “gazed”at the local Chinese communities from distance, these Chinese travelers often felt compelled to or simply naturally engaged in socio-political activities of their fellow countrymen in the colony within spaces such as private houses, restaurants, markets, amusement parks, cinemas, mine fields, factories, museums, temples, schools, and rubber plantations. In this process they helped or even took leadership role of the local Chinese communities in their resisting, communicating and sometimes compromising with different powers (such as colonial, indigenous etc.) under different circumstances. It was in this process that the original perception of the Nanyang Chinese as the “Other”, constructed before they arriving the place, was tested, reconstructed and mixed with the knowledge and experience derived from their direct engagement in the place. Their own identity as an outside observer was also transformed to or mixed with an active participant of the local affairs. In other words, the“Other” and “Self ” entered into each other.

Philip Kuhn's research from economic-history perspective leads to a similar conclusion: Chinese migrants and the creole populations started to form their own separate communities, as the competition between the two also grew (Kuhn 2008). Travelers acted like glue in bringing together not only the cultural elements of themselves and migrants from different parts of China, but also the elements of modern and traditional, Western and the colonial local cultures. The travelers created a common ideology within the Nanyang Chinese community. Therefore, in this complex process that the unique ethnical-symbols (such as the type of cuisine, clothing, local dialects, associations, rituals and festivals and literature and arts) of Nanyang Chinese that combined the cultural elements of Southern China, Nanyang and the West gradually took form.

As the Chinese society faced different press groups in colonial Nanyang, this research tries to create a multi-poles model to replace the popular two-side interaction research model in Nanyang Chinese studies. This model puts the Nanyang Chinese community in a multi-power field with several types of cultural space and observes also measures the strategies that these Chinese migrants choose for interacting with others. From this, the research tries to reveal the Nanyang Chinese community's own cultural characters. The theory of urban studies such as Lefebvre's space theory was applied to discover and analyze the cultural space in Nanyang society.

My research, from a historically evolutionary perspective, shows that a culturally independent category of such an ethnic group had taken form long before the formation of the political identity. This approach can be applied to studies of the Chinese overseas elsewhere.

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