On Not Speaking Chinese

Living Between Asia and the West

by

240 pages

English language

Published Dec. 21, 2001 by Routledge.

ISBN:
978-0-415-25912-5
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In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions betweenAsia' and the West' at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings ofChineseness' in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of …

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