Session Name: From Diaspora to Displacement: (Re-)confronting Community Identities in Global-Asian Struggles
3 - The Continuing Relevance of Chinatowns: Cultural Representations and Diasporic Landscapes
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract Chinatowns and other marked Asian settlements such as Japantowns and Korean Towns in major cities around the world have historically served as cultural hubs that played a central role in the global flows of Asian people, material goods, and culture. Variously, the functions and meanings of these settlements have changed over the different periods of the past century along with developments in geopolitics, trade relationships, migration trends, and advances in communication technology. In the latter half of the 20th century, settlement patterns of Chinese migrants are no longer centred in and around the ‘original’ Chinatowns and the presence of diasporic culture is more often dispersed throughout different locations of cities. More recently, it appears that the growing convenience afforded by the internet and other digital technologies (social media, online streaming platforms, online shopping etc) has rendered the physical presence of ethnic settlements entirely obsolete. Do Chinatowns and other ethnic neighbourhoods have any continuing relevance in the contemporary world? Have the trajectories of cultural flows been so fundamentally altered that the nodal functions of these cultural hubs have now been completely bypassed? The current paper attempts to answer some of these questions by identifying some of the changes in settlement patterns of Chinese migrants, the evolving functions and meanings of Chinatowns, and the shifting styles of cultural representations found in Chinese businesses and cultural institutions. Through this exploration, the author argues for an expanded understanding of cultural landscapes that accounts for the operations of both physical and virtual diasporic cultural networks.
Presenter(s)
YC
Yin-Lun Chan
Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
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