Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

/pdf/silencing-the-past-power-and-the-production-of-history-1uvybflqsn.pdf

Silencing the past: power and the production of history

Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans.

COURSE DESCRIPTION In popular and scholarly discourse, the term \"globalization\" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, a variety of media, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, \"globalization\" references the sense that we now live in a deeply and everincreasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization.

Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LICs)—those classes that have the spending power to participate effectively in consumer culture? Globalization research suggests that Bourdieu’s status consumption model, based upon Western research, does not provide an adequate explanation. And what we call the global trickle-down model, often invoked to explain LIC status consumption, is even more imprecise. We study the status consumption strategies of upper-middle-class Turkish women in order to revise three of Bourdieu’s most important concepts—cultural capital, habitus, and consumption field—to propose a theory specific to the LIC context. We demonstrate that cultural capital is organized around orthodox practice of the Western Lifestyle myth, that cultural capital is deterritorialized and so accrues through distant textbook-like learning rather than via the habitus, and that the class faction with lower cultural capital indigenizes the consumption field to sustain a national social hierarchy.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649759

Toward a Theory of Status Consumption in Less Industrialized Countries

The introduction of land prices and a real estate market in the reform period have led to residential differentiations in previously largely homogenous Chinese cities. Based on qualitative data from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an upscale Beijing suburb, in this paper I draw attention to the agency of urban residents in this process. I argue that housing choices in China today are deeply embedded in and related to a larger socio-cultural and spatial reconfiguration of Chinese society. The new urban middle class has developed specific ideas about their living environment and life-style. They aspire to have green space, better air quality, and spaciousness, among other physical characteristics, but also privacy and exclusivity in their new places of residence. I show that residential compounds have become the basis for identity and lifestyle formation, crucial in the process of social differentiation, which in turn underline and reinforce growing disparities in Chinese society. Over and above the outcome of economic restructuring and political decision making, residential differentiation in China today is a social practice that marks urban professionals' status and supports their new modern, urban identities. In addition, this social practice also has an impact on Beijing's suburbanization process.

“To Choose a House Means to Choose a Lifestyle.” The Consumption of Housing and Class-Structuration in Urban China

In this article, I explore the growing popularity of volunteering in China. I delineate several factors that play into the phenomenon, including students' desire to break out of strict routines, to engage in meaningful activities, to meet people, and to contribute to China's development. Linking these issues to the socio-political, economic, and ideological transformations in China, I show that we cannot meaningfully distinguish between altruistic and self-interested motivations to volunteer. For the students volunteering is a means to transform themselves into modern, entrepreneurial, and responsible selves, necessary to meet the challenges of urban life in China today. Yet, volunteering, encouraged and framed by the government, is also a ‘technology of power’, a means to nurture self-reliant and socially responsible individuals. I show that volunteerism is not simply the reflection of a new ‘governmentality’ but an encounter in which the very relationship between state and society is constantly negotiated.

Technology of Self, Technology of Power. Volunteering as Encounter in Guangzhou, China

Suburban Beijing: Housing and Consumption in Contemporary China

La diaspora china es la mas numerosa y la mas extendida entre todas las poblaciones migrantes del mundo. Hoy se estima que el numero de emigrantes ha llegado a los 40 millones. Lejos de ser un grupo homogeneo, los miembros de la diaspora china tienen distintos antecedentes economicos, culturales, sociales, educativos y personales, asi como historias de vida y emigracion muy diferentes. A pesar del creciente interes academico en la cuenca del Pacifico y en la constante inmigracion china hacia America en el siglo XX, casi no existe informacion sobre los chinos en Colombia. El presente articulo ofrece un acercamiento al tema desde el punto de vista historico, con el fin de llenar el vacio existente, poniendo lo poco que se sabe del tema en el contexto de la discusion sobre la diaspora, para enfatizar la transnacionalidad y la multiplicidad de identidades de este grupo de migrantes. Por otra parte, el articulo analiza las diferencias y similitudes entre la inmigracion china en Colombia y la de otros paises de America Latina y de otros continentes, relacionando esas particularidades con el contexto local.

/pdf/la-diaspora-china-un-acercamiento-a-la-migracion-china-en-4g50kblvjo.pdf

La diáspora china: un acercamiento a la migración china en Colombia

Domestic workers are a vital element of Latin American urban society. Focusing on the lives and experiences of household employees in Bogota, Colombia, this article examines the interrelation between space and socioeconomic differences in the urban context. More specifically, we explore female domestic workers’ “production of space” (Lefebvre, 1991), specifically analyzing how they use, experience, and intervene in the urban space. By following household employees in their trajectories, the project illuminates how space is stratified, how the women experience the space, and how spatial, social, and economic dimensions interact with each other to impact their lives and mobility possibilities. The research shows how spatial and socioeconomic mobility is put into practice and negotiated daily, not only in the city itself but also through extensions of time and space beyond the urban sphere.

/pdf/atravesando-la-ciudad-la-movilidad-y-experiencia-subjetiva-4azajbe3vm.pdf

Friederike Fleischer

Papers

“To Choose a House Means to Choose a Lifestyle.” The Consumption of Housing and Class-Structuration in Urban China

Technology of Self, Technology of Power. Volunteering as Encounter in Guangzhou, China

Suburban Beijing: Housing and Consumption in Contemporary China

La diáspora china: un acercamiento a la migración china en Colombia

Atravesando la ciudad. La movilidad y experiencia subjetiva del espacio por las empleadas domésticas en Bogotá