Being essentially Chinese

Abstract

The Postmodern view of Chinese identity, with its emphasis on self-invention and culture performance, does not gel with the real difficulties of identity formation in the real social, political world. While the approach exposes the fetishism of race, it replaces race with culture still seen in totalizing, essentialzing terms.

Keywords:

• Chinese identity
• identity politics
• culture
• race

Notes

¹Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese. The author is an Indonesian Chinese, who grew up in the Netherlands and does not speak Chinese.

²Lu, ‘A Mad Man's Diary’.

³Ong, Flexible Citizenship.

⁴Butler, Bodies That Matter; Butler, Excitable Speech.

⁵Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese.

⁶Ong, Flexible Citizenship.

⁷Clifford, The Predicament of Culture.

⁸Ibid., 338.

⁹Ibid.