Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Re-Imagining Space

Translocal China: linkages, identities and the ee-imagining of space. Edited by Tim Oakes, Louisa Schein. Routledge. 2006 270pp. £ hardback. ISBN 0-415-36930-7

This is a well-constructed edited collection that provides a clear path to understand the issue of translocality in contemporary China. Taking the term 'translocal' as an organizing concept and defining 'translocality' as 'being identified with more than one location' (xiii), the thirteen authors contribute to the book from a diverse set of perspectives with a fundamental argument that the contemporary translocailty is 'an artefact of China's economic and social unevenness'(30).

Highlighting a simultaneous analytical focus on mobilities and locailities, this book extends four complications to the notion of translocality .

First, translocality is materially and symbolically constituted, referring not only to the mobility of people but also to 'the circulation of capital, ideas, images, goods, styles, services, and disease, and etc'(1).

Second, translocality is not just images of connectedness, flows, networks, rhizomes, decenteredness, and deterritorialization, but an outcome of and reproduction of the China's economic and social unevenness.

Third, translocality is experienced and imagined by those who find their lives increasingly lived at several scales, or more than one places. The doubleness of translocality is thus seen in the simultaneous micro-scale experience of the body and macro-scale production of spatial imaginaries.

Fourth, the contemporary translocalities in China bears a historical pattern with an ideology of the imperial state.

This book collects eleven essays with an introductory chapter by Oakes and Schein. As a collection, the eleven papers are concrete examples to illustrate different complications of translocality, examine central theoretical issues at different levels of analysis. Faure and Siu (chapter 2) examine the late imperial state and Maoist eras arguing that contemporary translocality is embedded in state ideology and practice. A deliberate construction of a provincial identity by the party-state is described by Goodman (Chapter 3) and Feng and Zhan (chapter 4). The description of Hoffman's Dalian city (chapter 6), Wang's net-mom (chapter 8),Weng' HIV (chapter 10), Oakes's theme park (chapter 9), Hendrischke's private enterprises (chapter 5), shows the imagining of the local as a node of the global flow of capital, technology, disease, travel and new modes of regulation. The translocality here is both material and symbolic, shaped in part by international border. Cartier's southern cities of symbolic appeal and gendered representation (chapter 7), Schein's Miao women from Guizhou (chapter 11) and Sun's professional elites from Anhui (chapter

...