Page 214 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NOTES

schematization that only enhances feel-good smugness, not nuanced analysis. This
is not an issue I would like to go into, but see e.g. the articles in Wasserstrom and
Perry (1992) and Rey Chow’s critical essay, ‘Violence in the Other Country: China
as Crisis, Spectacle and Woman’ in Chow (1993). For an engaging and discerning,
anti-reductionist account of the politics of the 1989 Beijing uprising, based on anthro-
pological participant obsevation, see Chiu (1991).
2 See for a good example of the use of the autobiographic method for cultural theo-
rizing, Steedman (1986). In his review of this book Joseph Bristow (1991: 118–19)
states that ‘Steedman’s work, making . . . observations about how the self is situated
within the devices of reading and writing, has a fascination with those moments of
interpretation (or identification) that may, for example, move us to anger or to tears.’
In more general terms this kind of project draws on Raymond Williams’s concept of
‘structure of feeling’: ‘specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships:
not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical
consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity’ (Williams
1977: 132).
3 The term peranakan meaning ‘children of’, is derived from the Indonesian word
for child, anak, which is also the root of, for example, beranak, to give birth. Other
terms used to designate members of this community are baba (for the males), nyonya
(married female) and nona (unmarried female). Significantly, these are all Malay/
Indonesian terms, which are also in use in Malaysia and Singapore.
4 Totok is an Indonesian term meaning ‘pure blood foreigner’. The peranakans used the
term singkeh to designate this category of Chinese, meaning ‘new guests’.
5 It should be noted that the practices of the Dutch colonizers were particularly
oppressive in this respect. A fundamental principle of British colonialism, universal
equality before the law, was conspicuously absent in the Dutch system. Singapore
Chinese under British rule, for example, were not burdened with hated pass and
zoning systems (Williams 1960: 43). Such historical specificities make it impossible to
generalize over all peranakans in the South-East Asian region: the differential Western
colonialisms have played a central role in forming and forging specific peranakan
cultures.
6 This transnational political unification of overseas Chinese, a powerful precursor of
contemporary diaspora politics, is not unproblematic. For its unfortunate implications
for later generations of Indonesian Chinese, see Chapter 3; for its effects on the con-
struction of Chineseness in postcolonial South-East Asia more generally, see Chapter 4.
7 This view was expressed, for example, by the Partai Tionghoa Indonesia (the
Indonesian Chinese Party), founded in 1932, which was Indonesia-oriented and
identified itself with Indonesia rather than China or the Netherlands. Suryadinata
(1975) does not say how popular this position was.
8 Of course, the constitution of the modern nation–state of Israel is based on this
scenario.
9 See for a discussion of the paradox between the increasing appeal of nationalism on
the one hand, and the decline of the significance of the nation–state on the other,
Hobsbawm (1990), Chapter 6.
10 In Chapter 4 I will make the more radical argument to ‘undo’ the notion of (Chinese)
diaspora itself.
11 I appropriate this crucial distinction from Sollors (1986).

2 CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINESENESS?
1 See Stuart Hall’s similar critique of the notion of the ‘essential black subject’, e.g. in his
essays ‘New Ethnicities’ (1996d) and ‘What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’
(1996e).

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