HARVARD EAST ASIAN MONOGRAPHS
Cover: Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness, from Harvard University PressCover: Sovereignty at the Edge in HARDCOVER

Harvard East Asian Monographs 324

Sovereignty at the Edge

Macau and the Question of Chineseness

Product Details

HARDCOVER

$49.95 • £43.95 • €45.95

ISBN 9780674035454

Publication Date: 03/31/2010

Text

420 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

9 halftones, 2 maps

Harvard University Asia Center > Harvard East Asian Monographs

World, subsidiary rights restricted

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How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. As the Portuguese administration prepared to transfer Macau to Chinese control, it mounted a campaign to convince the city’s residents, 95 percent of whom identified as Chinese, that they possessed a “unique cultural identity” that made them different from other Chinese, and that resulted from the existence of a Portuguese state on Chinese soil.

This attempt sparked reflections on the meaning of Portuguese governance that challenged not only conventional definitions of sovereignty but also conventional notions of Chineseness as a subjectivity common to all Chinese people around the world. Various stories about sovereignty and Chineseness and their interrelationship were told in Macau in the 1990s. This book is about those stories and how they informed the lives of Macau residents in ways that allowed different relationships among sovereignty, subjectivity, and culture to become thinkable, while also providing a sense of why, at times, it may not be desirable to think them.

Awards & Accolades

  • 2010 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology

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