China Abroad – Travels, Subjects, Spaces

Elaine Yee Lin Ho is associate professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She has published book monographs on Timothy Mo (2000) and Anita Desai (2006), and many articles on anglophone world literatures and Hong Kong film, literature, and culture. Her current research interest is in literature and literary cultures at the intersections of Hong Kong, mainland China, and the West.

China Abroad is a valuable contribution to the field of transnational cultural studies of China. Its chapters weave together a richly textured palimpsest of competing discourses, images, representations, and dreams of what it means to be Chinese from the late nineteenth century up to the present. The careful study of these complex images in film, literature, media, and the internet generated from transversal spaces such as that of mainland intellectuals abroad, the former British colony of Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora from Southeast Asia, America, Europe, and Australia challenges hegemonic accounts of Chinese culture. The sheer diversity and heterogeneity of 'Chinese-ness' presented here functions as a conscientious corrective to the contemporary revival of Confucianism as the spirit of East Asian capitalism. -- Pheng Cheah, University of California at Berkeley