Duke University Press Diaspora's Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration

In Diaspora’s Homeland Shelly Chan provides a broad historical study of how the mass migration of more than twenty million Chinese overseas influenced China’s politics, economics, and culture. Chan develops the concept of “diaspora moments”—a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national, and global ones—to map the multiple historical geographies in which the Chinese homeland and diaspora emerge. Chan describes several distinct moments, including the lifting of the Qing emigration ban in 1893, intellectual debates in the 1920s and 1930s about whether Chinese emigration constituted colonization and whether Confucianism should be the basis for a modern Chinese identity, as well as the intersection of gender, returns, and Communist campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Adopting a transnational frame, Chan narrates Chinese history through a reconceptualization of diaspora to show how mass migration helped establish China as a nation-state within a global system. Review “This cutting-edge book will inspire future studies of transnational history. Highly recommended.” Author: G. Li Source: Choice "Building on approaches from postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies to criticize the nation-state and linear time, the book is really multiple books in one. At its heart lies the reconceptualization of diaspora . . . Diaspora’s Homeland sets out to raise new questions by bringing together three separate fields and in this, it certainly succeeds. . . . The book is based on meticulous research, including a wealth of multi-archival primary sources. In sum, the book not only offers a sweeping birds-eye view of modern Chinese history from a new perspective, but it also provides solid in-depth research on some less explored topics." Author: Els van Dongen Source: Journal of Social History "In this elegantly wrought and eloquently argued book, Chan revisits a familiar story—the emigration of an estimated twenty million Chinese in the century from 1840 to 1940—with fresh eyes, making the argument that the idea of China as a homeland and its emigrants as a diaspora were mutually constitutive. . . . Chan’s provocative framing of 'diaspora time' forces us also to rethink national time." Author: Denise Y. Ho Source: The Journal of Asian Studies Review "Shelly Chan's scholarship is superior in every imaginable way; her deft hand at bringing together the seldom connected fields of diaspora studies, modern Chinese history, and Asian American studies is a major contribution. I read this book straight through—I couldn't put it down." Author: James Hevia author of Source: The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia From the Author Shelly Chan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. About the Author Shelly Chan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.