1st Edition
Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas Migration Histories and the Cultural Heritage of the Homeland
Introduction
Part I: The Symbolic Museum
Chapter 1 The birth of the Overseas Chinese History Museum of China
Chapter 2 The representation of the Chinese diasporas as a ‘national self/other’
Part II: The Branding Museum
Chapter 3 Negotiating ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ authentication in diasporic heritage-making at a qiaoxiang
Chapter 4 Repatriation of Chinese cultural relics as a site for place-making and identity construction
Part III: The Memory Museum
Chapter 5 The stamp of identities: negotiating diasporic Chinese subjectivity in philatelic space
Chapter 6 How does a house remember? Materialising memories of return migration at a huaqiao farm
Part IV: The Im/possible Museum
Chapter 7 The im/possibility of museumifying the Chinese diasporas in South China
Conclusion
Biography
Cangbai Wang is Reader in Chinese Studies, School of Humanities at the University of Westminster in the UK.
"Museums of diaspora are increasingly present in countries of migrant settlement overseas, but also in sending or ancestral places. It is the latter sort that this excellent, deeply original, clearly written, and richly researched interdisciplinary study describes and analyses, with China and its officially sponsored and funded "Overseas Chinese museums" as its focus. Its author … brings together his research into a well organised and exhaustive volume … As he rightly points out … it is urgently necessary to integrate museum studies and migration history, and to establish a new focus away from migrants as an abstracted category and towards the material environment in which they move and on which they act."
Gregor Benton, The China Quarterly
"Since the 1980s, ‘Oversea Chinese museums’ have been rapidly developing around China. Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas is the first book dedicated to this social, political, and cultural phenomenon … Wang calls for further cross-disciplinary research on the three interrelated fields of diasporas, museums, and cultural heritage in China. The cross-fertilization between the three fields is a major contribution of the book. Wang provides a rich in-depth analysis, filling a lacuna in museum, migration, and heritage studies in China."
Yujie Zhu, The China Journal
"Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas persuasively interrogates what huaqiaowenwu (overseas Chinese heritage) is and how it is understood in China … Crucially, the book complicates the static and single dimensional portrayal of museums by shedding light on the multifarious interpretations of the past that the museum founders and buildings themselves engage in … more interdisciplinary scholarship, such as Wang’s, that is mutually constitutive of the migrant and the material world of migration is needed internationally to debunk the common nationalist emphasis associated with emigration histories and migrant heritage … a useful reference that has implications both for critical heritage studies in China and countries with histories of emigration outside China."
Christopher Cheng, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal
