Archipelagic, Insular, and Oceanic Paradigms in Transnational Circulations of Chineseness

This paper parses different conceptualizations of transnational analysis that illuminate circulations of Chineseness now and in the past. The analysis intends to survey the affordances and limits of thinking through questions about China and Chineseness in relation to different geographic and hydrographic modes. The archipelagic asks, after Glissant and others, how island chains facilitate framing regional analysis. Most frequently theorized in relation to the Caribbean, the paper analyzes what is submerged and what rises to the surface when the emphasis falls on Chinese archipelagoes. Drawing on Irit Rogoff and many other scholars, the category of the insular focuses on comparisons between farther-flung island spaces. For example, what might happen if Dongguan prison is put in relation to Angel Island in San Francisco and Cockatoo Island in Sydney? What is the relationship between the carceral and the touristic? Elaborating on the author’s most recent work, the oceanic refers to ongoing attempts to think about flows of Chineseness across vast spaces, in this case in terms of newly emerging maritime worldviews like the Chinese Atlantic and the Chinese Arctic.

Such a schematic framing of transnational Chinese circulations enables an analysis of the longue durée of colonialism, from trade to militarism to tourism. Specific examples of cultural production will serve to illustrate the entwinement of fantasy, politics, and economics that render different spaces meaningful at particular historical moments but also across time periods. Within these analytical structures, different human and non-human agents come to the fore. Empirical questions about what happened begin to shift towards epistemological questions about how we come to know about a specific nation or region in relation to the material and non-material elements that saturate thinking about place.