Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-jwnkl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T02:24:36.708Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Revisiting Distant Divides and Intimate Connections in Asia: Comments on Engseng Ho's “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2017

Nicole Constable
Nicole Constable*
Affiliation:
Nicole Constable (ncgrad@pitt.edu) is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Research Professor in the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
Get access

Extract

I am honored to comment on Engseng Ho's provocative essay through the lens of my own research on inter-Asian connections and mobilities in and beyond Asia. The abstract for the panel, entitled “The Flow of Migration beyond the State,” stated that “much scholarship on Asia is framed by organizational schemes that engage in spatial relationships and contrasts” (e.g., cores and peripheries, uplands and lowlands, mainland and islands) and that the idea of the “nation as a bordered entity” cross-cuts and transforms such common binaries. The panel's abstract also stated that the panel's goal was to “interrogate these borders” and to “rethink these schemes” and forge new understandings about nations, regions, and Asia by addressing questions such as: What happens when we decenter the state? What concepts of society capture external relations and engagements? What concepts apart from class, status, race, and gender will help us get a better understanding of transregional phenomena?

Type
Article Commentary
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 953 - 959
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1993. The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor? Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association.Google Scholar
Chan, Zi Lin Carol. 2017. “Gendered Moral Economies of Transnational Migration: Mobilizing Shame and Faith in Migrant-Origin Villages of Central Java, Indonesia.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole. 1994. Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits: A Hakka Community in Hong Kong. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole. 1999. “At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns.” Cultural Anthropology 14(2):203–28.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole, ed. 2005. Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole. 2007. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. 2nd ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole, ed. 2011. Migrant Workers in Asia: Distant Divides and Intimate Connections. New York: Routledge Press.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole. 2014. Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole. Forthcoming a. “Assemblages and Affect: Migrant Labour and the Varieties of Absent Children.” Global Networks.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole. Forthcoming b. “A Tale of Two Cities: Legislating Pregnancy and Marriage among Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong and Singapore.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59:3–7.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michelle. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
McKay, Deirdre. 2016. An Archipelago of Care: Filipino Migrants and Global Networks. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ong, Aihwa, and Collier, Stephen J., eds. 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann. 1989. “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures.” American Ethnologist 16(4):634–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, Ann. 1992. “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusions in Colonial Southeast Asia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34(3):514–51.Google Scholar
Watson, James L., ed. 2006. Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia. 2nd ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar