Customer Reviews

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

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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.

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.

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