Today I wrote an email to a colleague in which I briefly described my project in three sentences. I include that in here because my colleague is Taiwanese and from a different (but related) discipline, so I felt like trying to explain it to her is one way of clarifying in my mind what I'm actually trying to write about.
Otherwise, I've been reading through Allen Chun's Forget Chineseness to see how he's approaching the idea of Chineseness. I think his approach might be more useful for my project than some others that I've seen. As Chun puts it, "To problematize Chineseness as constitutive of an ongoing historical framework, from a comparative perspective and within a transnational or glocal context, serves to problematize the nature of contexts that invoke Chineseness as an ethnic or cultural problem, among other things" (x). I've already read several of the articles that have been revised into chapters for this book, so I know that his approach and perspective are amenable to my own.
I also read a few reviews of his book from different scholarly journals. Sometimes I find that reading different reviews of a book before I get into the book itself helps me do several things: determine if the book is actually worth reading (either out of quality or relevance to my work or interests); get a sense of the structure and arguments of the book (I tend to get bogged down in detail both as a reader and as a writer); get an idea of some possible shortcomings of the book that I might not notice on my own. Since I don't plan on reading the whole book at this point, the reviews can also help me pinpoint areas of use to me that I might not have noticed from looking at the index or reading the contents page or introduction.
Some people might feel that this is "cheating" or that it will bias my perspective toward the book, but I think this kind of "lateral reading" is worthwhile, not just for websites or memes, but also for published work. Particularly because Chun's book is not in my discipline, I find it helpful to get "insiders'" perspectives on it before I consider reading and citing it in more depth. And while I can keep their points of view in mind as I read from the book, I don't have to accept their conclusions if I find they're different from my own views.
If you're curious, here are the reviews of Chun's book that I read (sorry for the different citation formats and the Northeastern proxies):
- (2019) Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 49:2, 335-337, DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2018.1562561
- Gillette, Maris B. 2018. "Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification." Pacific Affairs 91(4):783-786 (https://link.ezproxy.neu.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/scholarly-journals/on-geopolitics-cultural-identification/docview/2166930477/se-2?accountid=12826).
- Li, Yao-Tai. “Book Review: Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification.” Cultural Sociology 11, no. 4 (December 2017): 540–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975517731079c.
- Carrico, K. (2017). Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification Allen Chun New York: SUNY Press, 2017 xii 284 pp. $95.00 ISBN 978-1-4384-6471-8. The China Quarterly, 232, 1116–1117. http://doi.org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1017/S0305741017001436
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