Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies) - Softcover

Roberts, Jayde Lin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295744251 ISBN 13: 9780295744254

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2019

Synopsis

Mapping Chinese Rangoon is both an intimate exploration of the Sino-Burmese, people of Chinese descent who identify with and choose to remain in Burma/Myanmar, and an illumination of twenty-first-century Burma during its emergence from decades of military-imposed isolation. This spatial ethnography examines how the Sino-Burmese have lived in between states, cognizant of the insecurity in their unclear political status but aware of the social and economic possibilities in this gray zone between two oppressive regimes. For the Sino-Burmese in Rangoon, the labels of Chinese and Tayout (the Burmese equivalent of Chinese) fail to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences between the separate groups that have settled in the city—Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka—and conflate this diverse population with the state actions of the People’s Republic of China and the supposed dominance of the overseas Chinese network. In this first English-language study of the Sino-Burmese, Mapping Chinese Rangoon examines the concepts of ethnicity, territory, and nation in an area where ethnicity is inextricably tied to state violence.

About this title

About the Authors

Jayde Lin Roberts is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of New South Wales.

Laurie J. Sears is the Walker Family Endowed Professor in History at the University of Washington. She is the author of several books, including Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive(U. of Hawai'i Press, 2013) and Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales (Duke University Press, 1996).

Vincente L. Rafael is the Giovanni and Anne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Duke University Press, 2016), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Duke University Press, 2005), and several other books.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295744251
• ISBN 13: 9780295744254
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224