Chinatown Unbound - by Kay Anderson & Ien Ang & Andrea del Bono & Donald McNeill & Alexandra Wong

About the Book

This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in our understanding of Chinatown, through an in-depth case study of Sydney's Chinatown.

Book Synopsis

This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in our understanding of Chinatown, through an in-depth case study of Sydney's Chinatown.

Review Quotes

By portraying Sydney's Chinatown as a communicative space in which people cross and challenge national boundaries to articulate their views and connect their voices, the book reminds readers that Chinatown is more a mental construct than an administrative or geographical reality. And by offer­ing a sophisticated view of both new and evolving identities in Chinatown, it demolishes the idea of fixed boundaries that curtails potential epistemologi­cal avenues. Most importantly, it is a valuable corrective to the power imbal­ance between the West (Europe and North America) and the Rest (in this case, Asia), which has rendered Asianness and Chineseness a distant, fictive voice. . . both experts and lay readers can benefit from reading about a Chinatown that can be interpreted in many innovative ways and relish the challenges and opportunities of navigating its possibilities.

As China races to become the world's largest economy, the view of western Chinatowns as inward-looking ethnic enclaves, decimated by poverty and pervasive racism, has become anachronistic. In this superb interpretation of Sydney's Chinatown, a team of top scholars of China overseas provide a sophisticated view of the identities of the new Chinatown, a view where diversity and transnational mobility provide the new normal, provoking substantial theoretical and empirical recalibration.

Chinatown Unbound is a welcome and extremely timely refresh for this dynamic area of study. The book's nuanced, incisive research presents us with a beautifully informed focus on the sociocultural contours of Sydney's Chinatown. The sophisticated texture of this study will be relevant to many fields of research, from trans-Asian studies and cultural geography to Australian Studies, public culture, and migration and mobility studies.

Instead of dwelling on the simplistic dichotomy between majority and minority, East and West, sameness and difference, and viewing Chinatowns as fixed and essentialized, authors in Chinatown Unbound have done an admirable job in unpacking the layers of tensions, complexity, and ongoing socioeconomic changes in Sydney's Chinatown as a case study. The work is particularly relevant today with the rise of racial and ethnic tensions around the world and contestations over identities, migration, and belonging.

Sydney's Chinatown has emerged from an ethnic enclave of internal exclusion to become a major hub mediating Australia-Asia relations. We learn in fascinating detail how state racialization of Chinese identity is giving way to a flexible deployment of all things Chinese in a transnational milieu of trade, culture, and politics. China Unbound explodes old models of Asian urbanism.

About the Author

Kay Anderson, Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.

Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University, Australia.

Andrea Del Bono, PhD Graduate, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.

Donald McNeill, Professor of Urban and Cultural Geography, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.

Alexandra Wong, Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.