Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2008
Publisher
Peter Lang Publishing
Abstract
Cultural differences are produced and maintained in numerous relations as spaces and places are. Spaces such as nation-states are made and organized hierarchically through historical agency within the parameter of unbalanced power interactions. They are imagined, contested, and enforced through processes in which multiple sociopolitical structures are implicated. In the de-territorialized age, the ways in which people "confound or reinforce the established spatial orders either through physical movement or through their own conceptual and political acts of re-imagination" are central for any research on people's dynamic acts of cultivating, identifying, and communicating processes (Gupta and Ferguson 17). This is especially true considering that the legacy of colonialism continues to affect all human relations. Taiwanese and Chinese transnationalists inhabited on the border of El Paso and Juarez formed various relationships through their traveling under the parameter of colonial and imperial power nexuses. Critical cultural ethnographer Rosaldo contends that borderlines should no longer be perceived as "analytically empty transitional zones," but instead as "creative cultural production that requires investigation" (Culture and Truth 208). Being interested in learning cultural practices and identity negotiations in the current globalized world, I perceive all cultural knowledge as something embedded with deeply rooted significance and created with various forces driving people's emotions and actions. This book unpacks various ways in which these culturing processes are accomplished by a Chinese community traveling and dwelling on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Chapter of
Culturing interface: Identity, communication, and Chinese transnationalism
Recommended Citation
Cheng, H.-I. (2008). When (Post)coloniality Meets Transnationalism. In Culturing interface: Identity, communication, and Chinese transnationalism (pp. 9–30). Peter Lang Publishing.
Comments
Version of Record that has been published in Culturing interface: Identity, communication, and Chinese transnationalism by Hsin-I Cheng in the series Critical Intercultural Communication Studies, Volume 11. The original work can be found at: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1104584. © Peter Lang AG, 2008. All rights reserved.