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                                                 ••• Ann Brooks •••

                      the differentiated nature of diasporic groupings represented in different genders, classes
                      and ethnicities. This approach enriches the monovocalism of sociology’s traditional
                      modernist metanarratives around class, gender and ethnicity. In addition to the inter-
                      section of feminism and postcolonialism which has already subverted sociology’s tra-
                      ditional boundaries, there has been an extension of these debates into the area of filmic
                      and media discourse, in particular, links between theorizing ‘travel’ and its implications
                      for deconstructing colonial representations and the ‘imperial gaze’ within cinemato-
                      graphic discourse.


                       The politics of representation and the construction of identity – cultural studies as a site for
                                 reconceptualizing colonial representation, subjectivity and identity


                      Feminist and postcolonial theorists have interrogated historiographical and cultural
                      discourses in the process of reconceptualizing colonial representation, subjectivity
                      and identity. An important body of work has emerged around theorizing ‘travel’ as
                      developed in the work of James Clifford (1992). An important additional and related
                      area is that of critical ethnography. An example of a critical ethnographic approach
                      to Chinese transnationalism is expounded in the work of Ong and Nonini. They are
                      critical of ‘the American cultural studies approach that treats transnationalism as a
                      set of abstracted, dematerialized cultural flows, giving scant attention either to the
                      concrete, everyday changes in people’s lives or to the structural reconfigurations that
                      accompany global capitalism’ (Nonini and Ong, 1997: 13).
                        While they recognize the valuable work contained in the journal Public Culture in
                      the area of transnational mass media, publics, and cultural politics (see Gole, 2002),
                      in carving out a new idea for anthropological investigation, they express concern
                      about what is left out of this analysis in terms of describing the ways in which peo-
                      ple’s everyday lives are transformed by the effects of global capitalism. As Nonini and
                      Ong (1997: 13) observe: ‘While we have learned much from and value the focus on
                      social imaginaries, new globalized literary and aesthetic genres, and abstracted cul-
                      ture flows, we are apprehensive about the limitations of what might be called lite
                      anthropology.’ They highlight the work of Clifford in considering ‘travel’ as an alter-
                      native to ‘the village’ for contemporary ethnography.



                                     Travel, the ‘imperial gaze’ and colonial representation
                      There are a number of dimensions to the conceptualization of ‘travel’ and its impli-
                      cations for the constitutive role of culture in the formation of ‘imperial relations’.
                      This has been captured in literary and filmic discourse.
                        Benedict Anderson has persuasively argued in his analysis of the development of
                      vernacular print culture, visual and literary culture played a crucial role in the con-
                      struction of the ‘imagined’ national communities in Europe that underpinned the
                      imperial ideologies and administrations of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
                      centuries (Lewis, 1996: 13).
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