Page 208 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

(1989) refers to as “time – space compression”’. This can be combined with an analysis
of new distinctive lifestyles (see also Brooks, 2006) ‘grounded in high mobility (both
spatial and in terms of careers), new patterns of urban residence, and new kinds of
social integration defined by a consumerist ethic’ (ibid.: 11). Featherstone (1990) has
described these new social arrangements as ‘third cultures’, which he defines as
emerging from ‘global cultural flows’ which transcend control of nation – states.
Nonini and Ong (1997) maintain that Chinese transnationalism forms one such
‘third culture’ which provides ‘alternative visions’ to Western modernity and ‘gener-
ates new and distinctive social arrangements, cultural discourses, practices and sub-
jectivities’. Perhaps most crucial, new identities are thereby constituted – ‘new types
of flexible personal controls, dispositions, and means of orientation, in effect a new
kind of habitus’ (Featherstone, 1990: 8).
In adopting this position Nonini and Ong take a postmodern approach to the
geopolitical roots of Chinese transnationalism. As they themselves acknowledge,
their perspective seeks to go beyond ‘a post-Orientalist’ approach (see Dirlik, 1993;
Wilson and Dirlik, 1994) by focusing on ethnographical detail of social and cultural
practices related to Chinese transnationalism. Nonini and Ong claim that their
approach combines an understanding of economic, political and cultural reconfigu-
rations which define Chinese transnationalism. So what are the implications for
Chinese identities and subjectivities of an analysis of transnationalism and transcul-
turalism? Nonini and Ong claim:

In recasting the analysis of identities and subjectivities, we reject the conven-
tional assumption that a person simply ‘has’ or ‘possesses’ an identitity … In
contrast, critical anthropology, feminism, and cultural studies have come to
view identities and bodies, through variously marked, possessed, and experi-
enced, as unstable formations constituted within webs of power relations …
Different identities – gender, race, nationality, subculture, dominant culture-
intersect in and constitute an individual … The different subject positions of
diaspora Chinese, formed by their allegiances to various places, as well as by a
propensity to sojourning as a way of life, engender contradictory subjectivities
that are at once fluid, fragmentary but also enabling of an agency to circum-
vent certain modalities of control, while taking advantage of others.

(1997: 24–5)

The implications of these new types of subjectivities is that the nation – state and its
accompanying ideology are now a highly contested domain when it comes to remak-
ing identity. Thus both nation – state and national identities are increasingly eroded
by the constituent elements that go to make up globalization (Hall, 1991). Stuart
Hall has long indicated how aspects of globalization have redefined modernist con-
cepts of nationhood and national identity. As Nonini and Ong (1999: 26) show:
‘Transnational publics are framing new Chinese subjectivities that are increasingly
independent of place, self-consciously postmodern and subversive of national
regimes of truth.’

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