Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

by Aihwa Ong

Book Overview

Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalisation. Are nation-states being transformed by globalisation into a single globalised economy? Do global cultural forces herald a postnational millennium? Tying ethnography to structural analysis, Flexible Citizenship explores such questions with a focus on the links between the cultural logics of human action and on economic and political processes within...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822322692
• ISBN13: 9780822322696
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A powerful examination of patterns of transnationality in the Pacific Rim

Aihwa Ong uses the example of the international (and now transnational) diaspora of "guoqiao" or overseas Chinese to look at the construction of flexable citizenships. These communities, she argues, increasingly construct their cultural identities through a pramatic assesment of the best strategies of advancement, irregardless of national place. In this way, Hong Kong capital has been key to the transformation of mainland China, Malaysian Chinese send their "parachute" kids to America for education, and the Singapore leadership brings in Harvard professors to help them construct an alternative modernity centered on conceptions of Confucianism. She addresses the ways in which race can still form a glass celing, even when transnationals have all the right cultural capital, and the way "traditional" gender roles are reestablished to meet the need of the (male) transnational class to have a (female) foundation in one place. She also discusses the ways in which the advanced agency of the transnational class is dependant on a much more restricted class of people. Although some of Ong's conclusions demand reconsideration in light of the Financial Crisis of '97, the return of Hong Kong and the events of 9/11, and although her tone occasionally waxes chauvainistic, much of her analysis still rings true.

very important work

This is a great book. Much more thoughtful than most of the more fashionable post-colonial or globalization writers. Ong demonstrates how the Chinese transnational community confounds notions of peripheral non-westerners, or transnational community as weapon of the weak. She also demonstrates how the contemporary world is creating the context for the rise of China. The ultimate antidote to babble about how we have moved into a world beyond identities and geopolitics.

Brilliant analysis of globalization within anthropology

A must read for anthropologists and other social scientists interested in the process of globalization.