| Details | | Publication Date: | 1998-07-01 | | Series: | Globalization and Community, V. 2 |
| Size | | Length: | 248 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 12.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
In the American popular imagination, Chinatown is a mysterious and dangerous place, clannish and dilapidated, filled with sweatshops, vice, and organized crime. In this well-written and engaging volume, Jan Lin presents a real-world picture of New York City's Chinatown, countering this "orientalist" view by looking at the human dimensions and the larger forces of globalization that make this vital neighborhood both unique and broadly instructive. Using interviews with residents, firsthand observation, archival research, and U.S. census data, Lin delivers an informed, reliable picture of Chinatown today. Lin claims that to understand contemporary ethnic neighborhoods like this one we must dispense with notions of monolithic "community". When he looks at Chinatown, Lin sees a neighborhood that is being rebuilt, both literally and economically. Rather than a clannish and unified peer group, he sees substantial class inequality and internal social conflict. There is also social change, most visibly manifested in dramatic episodes of collective action by sweatshop workers and community activists and in the growing influence of Chinatown's denizens in electoral politics. Popular portrayals of Chinatown also reflect a new global reality: as American cities change with the international economy, traditional assumptions about immigrant incorporation into U.S. society alter as well. Lin describes the public disquiet and official response regarding immigration, shops, and the influx of Asian capital. He outlines the ways that local, state, and federal governments have directed and gained from globalization in Chinatown through banking deregulation and urban redevelopment policy. Finally, Linputs forth Chinatown as a central enclave in the "world city" of New York, arguing that globalization brings similar structural processes of urban change to diverse locations. In the end, Lin moves beyond the myth of Chinatown, clarifying the meaning of globalization and its myriad effects within the local context.
Industry Reviews
"A brilliant execution of what we can think of as a new research strategy: how to study globalization through the details of a micro-level focus, how to capture cross-border dynamics in the complexities of localized social forms."
Sassen
"In this ethnography Jan Lin brilliantly explodes multiple fables about Chinatown constructed by white mythmakers over the last century. Politicians, movies, and TV shows have created stereotypes of dangerous or mysterious 'Orientals' and of exotic urban zones and red light districts. This anti-immigrant imagery gives way as we see the complexity and vitality of life in Manhattan's Chinatown community, a real place with the sights and sounds of real people. These Americans have built community in the face of chronic intrusions--from government redevelopment and federal immigration policy to corporate exploitation and cycling investment from China. Using diverse research methods, Lin reveals the problems and change characteristic of urban communities thrust increasingly into the globalizing economy of the late twentieth century."
Feagin
"Much has been made of the increasingly transnational character of Asian American communities, but virtually no community studies have emerged to thoroughly interrogate this condition. Lin engages this absence by dramatically illustrating how localized processes of development and change are shaped by the new global economy. His study of Chinatown explores the connections between capital and labor, the community, and the state, and demonstrates how structural forces and representational practices are intertwined in the construction of racialized places. This book truly represents the next wave of community studies."
Omi
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