Flexible+Citizenship

1 What three quotes capture the critical import of the text?
 * __ Ong, Aihwa. 1998. //Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality//. Duke Univ. Press, Chapel Hill __**

Identity (Subjectivity and Authoritative/official) are increasingly interacting as they become more flexible, and they represent challenges to traditional understandings. “The immigrants’ strategies of accumulation and relocation imply alternative notions of citizenship within the dominant frame of ‘American’ neoliberalism and suggest that citizenship benefits, even for the entrenched white middle class have become more precarious in a world of circulating multinational subjects. Ultimately, the new Asian rich make whiteness a more problematic concept in the era of globalization” (109)

2 What is the main argument of the text?

The work is at its center an ethnography of, largely elite, Chinese emigrants between the U.S. and Asia. What she terms “translocal ethnic-Chinese diasporas.” In an era of globalization, individuals as well as governments become increasingly flexible. Ong focuses on how this process is enacted in policy and practice of citizenship and sovereignty. “Flexible citizenship” comes from the many skilled and unskilled workers crossing borders, flexible citizenship refers especially to the strategies and effects of managers and technology professionals (the elites who Ong focuses on) seeing both circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes by selectively practicing citizenship and family location. Globalization makes states as well as individuals more flexible, disagreeing with the weakening of the nation state, rather suggesting a reinvention of self by the states; this contrasts to Beck and Castells’ conceptions of the weakening, and potential dissolution of the nation-state. Ong intends to: “tease out the rationalities (political, economic, cultural) that shape migration, relocation, business networks, state-capital relations, and all transnational processes that are apprehended through and directed by cultural meanings.”

“Flexible citizenship” (e.g. holding multiple passports, and regularly traveling between countries) serves to allow individuals and nations to work against capital accumulation and to in nominal ways progress from international and local inequality.

“Graduated sovereignty” is the idea that different people and zones within the nation-state are subject to different forms of and implementations of laws and policy. (nice quote p 239)

She questions the turnover & perceived increasing equality of Asia to the West. (p.80) Summary of text in afterward (p.243)

3 Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.

1) Ethnographic methods showing individual and localized cultural practice. 2) Careful engagement of multiple broad bodies of literature on globalization, migration, and political economy.

3) Focused multi-scale analysis, documenting comparable and compatible trends in flexibility at the individual, cultural, national and international level to support her initial and concluding emphasis on this particular aspect of globalization.

4 Describe the main literatures that the text draws on and contributes to.

Globalization theory (Wallerstein, Beck, Castells) Diaspora and Migration Studies Development Postcolonial Studies Cultural Anthropology

5 Describe at least three of the text’s themes or topics that are of general interest in STS.

I Privileging and changing roles of technological expertise.

II Situated and contextual knowledges, performative formation of certainty (quote-ish p.53)

III Broadly- the policy and social worlds which form scientific discourse are changing, this is an attempt to track and determine the forms of change, and suggesting avenues of research toward which it will be necessary to see the new institutions and cultures.

6 Explain how this book could inform your research.

Ong, provides thoughtful critique of many major theoretical approaches to globalization, central is her attempt to balance cultural and economic pictures of the changes. Her use of multi-sited, and multi-population, ethnography and its pairing with both demographic and recent historical patterns provides a sample method to look at cultural and individual shifts, within economic and macro schema, without losing account of individual agency. Type in the content of your new page here.