Contesting British Chinese Culture

Ashley Thorpe, Diana Yeh, Ashley Thorpe, Diana Yeh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319711591
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first text to address British Chinese culture. It explores British Chinese cultural politics in terms of national and international debates on the Chinese diaspora, race, multiculture, identity and belonging, and transnational 'Chineseness'. Collectively, the essays look at how notions of 'British Chinese culture' have been constructed and challenged in the visual arts, theatre and performance, and film, since the mid-1980s. They contest British Chinese invisibility, showing how practice is not only heterogeneous, but is forged through shifting historical and political contexts; continued racialization, the currency of Orientalist stereotypes and the possibility of their subversion; the policies of institutions and their funding strategies; and dynamic relationships with transnationalisms. The book brings a fresh perspective that makes both an empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of race and cultural production, whilst critically interrogating the very notion of British Chineseness.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ashley Thorpe and Diana Yeh (eds.)Contesting British Chinese Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71159-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Contesting British Chinese Culture

Ashley Thorpe¹ and Diana Yeh²

(1)

Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

(2)

Department of Sociology, City, University of London, London, UK

Ashley Thorpe (Corresponding author)

Diana Yeh

Email: [email protected]

Author names are in alphabetical order

End Abstract

In 2007, amid a growing China fever in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, which greatly overshadowed the tenth-year anniversary of the Hong Kong handover, the artist Anthony Key completed a new work (Fig. 1.1). He entitled it Battle of Britain (2007), invoking what has been mythologized as one of the pivotal moments in British history, when, in 1940, Britain won a battle in the skies against Hitler’s aerial power. Churchill couched this moment as Britain’s “finest hour,” declaring: “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire” (Churchill 1940). In Key’s work, a life-size operations war room table map depicts not Nazi invasion but, as the scores of red flags and banners punctuating the table map reveal, a series of dragon boats, jade gardens, and lucky houses staking claims to the land. The work materializes a personal homage that seeks to make visible the histories of Chinese immigrants in Britain—often cited as “the least noticed” (Parker 1995: 2) of all Britain’s racialized minorities and obscured in the grand narratives of nation. Each flag or banner displays the names of real catering establishments and pinpoints their location, bearing testimony to the presence of some 8,234 actual Chinese restaurants and takeaways open for business across the British Isles at the time the artwork was created. The work is an act of patient, if imperfect, documentary that makes visible in a single image the extent of the hitherto-unseen scattered presences of the Chinese population across even the farthest of territories. Yet, by staging a scene of war manoeuvres, the work is as much a play on centuries’-old British fears of being overtaken by an impending “red threat” (or “yellow peril”) as an allusion to the contemporary politics of belonging in Britain, where generations of Chinese Britons still often become visible only in the context of—and are deemed to “belong” in—an ethnic niche of restaurant and takeaway businesses (Parker and Song 2009).

Fig. 1.1

Anthony Key, Battle of Britain (2007). (©Anthony Key)

We begin with Key’s work as it raises a number of pertinent issues and themes that frame the concerns of this book. This first edited volume to address the construction and contestation of British Chinese culture, developed from a conference held in the department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading in 2011, fills a significant gap in the study of what might be termed “British Chinese” cultural politics. In doing so, it makes visible its contribution to national and international debates on race, diaspora, migration, multiculture, identity, and transnationalism. It locates these cultural politics within wider global movements and contributes to academic debates on Chinese and Asian diasporas worldwide as well as to specific debates on British multiculture. There has been a long history of scholarship on Asian American cultural politics (Lowe 1996), and the burgeoning of work on Asian Australian (Ang et al. 2000; Khoo 2008) and Asian Canadian (Li 2007) culture in recent years has led to the institutionalization of these areas of research as fields of study. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, there has been a groundswell of critical work on the politics of Black British and British Asian cultural politics since the 1980s. However the British Chinese have been largely absent from these debates. Unlike in the United States, Canada, and Australia, where the Chinese and other East Asians dominate diasporic Asian cultural politics and are hegemonic over other groups, in the United Kingdom, as a direct legacy of the British Empire, the term “Asian” usually refers to South Asians from the Indian subcontinent and excludes the Chinese and other East Asians (for an exception, see Murphy and Sim 2008). The ways in which these categorizations take place and their effects are not incidental or unproblematic. For this reason, we use the term “British Chinese” “under erasure,” critically aware, as the title of this volume suggests, of the debate that it generates in constructing boundaries that exclude as much as include and its inadequacies in reflecting the extraordinary diversity of practices, politics, and histories that it seeks to encompass.

The politics underpinning this volume echoes the ambitions of the field of Sinophone studies to deconstruct “Chineseness” and refute the idea of transnational Chinese diasporas reified by their relationships to the Chinese mainland. Rather, identities are described through the analysis of specific localized interactions in the context of national and transnational multicultural interrelations (Shih 2013: 7). Although the volume is sympathetic to the implications of Sinophone studies, this growing area of study focuses on linguistic heritages and omits work not expressed in Chinese languages. The practice of much British Chinese culture is undertaken in English. In order to offer a fuller articulation of British Chinese culture, it is imperative to recognize that localized modalities of Chinese languages represent only one factor in cultural self-identification and politics. Although some practitioners in this volume, such as Veronica Needa, explore language as tool for interrogating “Eurasian” identities (another disputed term), others purposefully operate outside of the linguistic “Sinosphere.”

As discussed in Chapter 2 by Diana Yeh, in the 1990s, the term “British Chinese” became mobilized by cultural practitioners to stake claim to belonging to and recognition within the national body and to articulate a position that was also marginalized and rendered invisible within the so-called Black arts and Chinese art paradigms. From its beginnings, however, its boundaries were highly contested and its meanings disputed. In part, this reflected the diverse backgrounds of those classified as “Chinese” in Britain. While the generations of the 1950s and 1960s were often Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese from the New Territories, the 1970s–1980s saw significant numbers of ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, arriving in Britain. More recently, there has been a significant surge in immigration from Mandarin-speaking parts of China, as well as an exponential increase in students and workers from Asia, especially China, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, who are further transforming understandings of “British Chinese” today. Ethnic Chinese have also long arrived, albeit in smaller numbers, from Britain’s former colonies—such as India, Mauritius, and Guyana—alongside others from the United States, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere. Thus, fierce debates have arisen over hegemonic formulations of “British Chinese” and whether it should refer, for example, to anyone Chinese living in Britain, to the Chinese in Britain who have had experience of living in one of Britain’s former colonies, or to British-born Chinese, and who is rendered invisible in these dominant definitions. Another point of contention has been the position of “multiracial” or “mixed” individuals, who have often experienced invisibility if not exclusion due to narrow understandings of what constitutes “authentic” “Chineseness.”

Further, when debates over British Chineseness have surfaced in relation to cultural production, the emphasis on race and ethnicity per se, over issues of artistic practice notably, but also other factors, such as class, gender, sexuality, generation, and geography, has been widely disputed. This, particularly so in the context where dominant understandings of “diasporic” and “transnational” cultural practices assume ties to a primordial ethnicity linked to the “homeland” (Anthias 1998) (here, “China”) rather than to specific localities or, recognizing the multidirectional routes of inspiration and identification that might connect “British Chinese” artists to, for example, African American, Korean or French Canadian artists (Yeh 2014a; Rogers, Chapter 13, this volume). Further, as the category “British Chinese” became institutionalized in the 1990s, contestations grew in response to the ways in which it became used, if not, co-opted to package and commodify rather than engage difference, often rendering invisible precisely those positions, experiences, and subjectivities that once sought recognition under its name.

Equally problematic has been the way in which the term “Chinese,” as a result of colonial legacies, has effectively functioned as a racial category in Britain and become hegemonic over other East and Southeast Asian identities, prompting alternative mobilizations over “Oriental” (a highly contentious term) and British East Asian identities (Yeh 2014a). As Yeh notes in Chapter 2, this volume, opportunities for British Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Filipino, and other East and Southeast Asian artists have often been shaped by “Chineseness,” and despite attempts to carve out recognition to combat incorporation and erasure within the category “Chinese,” such mobilizations did not significantly change public discourse during the 1990s. Only in recent years has mobilization around “British East Asian” entered cultural and academic discourse, where the term is often, to the consternation of Southeast Asians, used to include those from Southeast Asia.

The book begins to chart these contestations by examining how notions of “British Chinese culture” have been constructed and challenged across the visual arts, film, theatre, and performance. Although there is an emerging body of sociological literature surrounding British Chinese identities,¹ this book is distinctive in adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that maps the trajectories of past and present cultural practices from a number of academic and artistic perspectives. It brings together contributions from scholars working across the disciplines of sociology, geography, theatre studies, art history, and film and screen studies, and artists from across the visual arts, film, photography, and theatre and performance. Unlike more totalizing forms of knowledge production, the volume does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of the field and necessarily excludes a host of cultural practices, such as poetry and literature, fashion and design, music and other forms of popular culture, despite flourishing activity in all these realms (for work on popular music and the nightlife and entertainment industries, see Yeh 2014a, c). It seeks instead to provide in-depth insight into specific areas of research that are particularly vibrant, focusing on the visual arts, film, theatre, and performance with a view to encouraging further inquiry across different fields.

In bringing together a range of scholars and artists from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Contesting British Chinese Culture
• 2. The Cultural Politics of In/Visibility: Contesting ‘British Chineseness’ in the Arts
• 3. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Dancing in the Margins/on the Border of Oblivion
• 4. “A History Written by Our Bodies”: Artistic Activism and the Agonistic Chinese Voice of Mad For Real’s Performances at the End of the Twentieth Century
• 5. Testing, Contesting
• 6. Manchester’s Chinese Arts Centre: A Case Study in Strategic Cultural Intervention
• 7. From South China to South London: A Journey in Search of Home Through Fine Art Practice
• 8. The Artist-Photographer and Performances of Identity: The Camera as Catalyst
• 9. British Chinese Cinema and the Struggle for Recognition, Even on the Margins
• 10. Cinema of Displaced Identity
• 11. The Arts Britain Utterly Ignored: Or, Arts Council Revenue Funding and State Intervention in British East Asian Theatre in the Late 1990s and Early 2000s
• 12. FACE: Autobiographical Theatre and Cross-Cultural Considerations
• 13. British Chinese Performance in Minor Transnational Perspective
• Back Matter