As the title indicates, this edited volume brings together a new generation of sociolinguists to provide descriptively rich empirical studies of Chinese identity that reflect the complexity of Chineseness in China and the Chinese diaspora in the context of globalisation. Deeply rooted in the poststructuralist paradigm, in which Chineseness is understood as emergent, diverse, fluid, and hybrid, as constructed through language and discourse, and as an ‘ideologically constructed variable’ (4), it appears that the collection's contributors see Chineseness as primarily postmodern in nature, but with some components of the modern stance in terms of perceiving it as what Shuang Gao calls in the editor's introduction ‘the persistence of old ideologies and their tensions with emergent and new ones’ (3).
As the authors in this volume demonstrate empirically, essentialist stereotyping and orientalist ideas remain as powerful as they once were (see, for example, Elaine Chung & Xuan Wang's chapter on Joseonjok YouTubers and the online vernacular discourse they generate in the South Korean setting), and thus should still be taken into consideration in our theorisation of Chineseness today; by contrast, while fluidity, flexibility, and hybridity may be observed realities for elite and middle-class Chinese (see, for example, Eric S. Henry's chapter on aspiring Chinese transnational migrants and their narrations of future selves as globally competent cosmopolitans in Chinese IELTS preparation classes), such social and linguistic practices may only exist in the imaginations of those not well integrated into the global system. Consequently, to grasp the intricacies of Chineseness calls for more attention to be paid to the historically persisting systems of inequality and ambiguity, as well as the dynamic interactions between the dominant, residual, and emergent at social change intersections.
A notable feature of this volume lies in its choice of the under-researched issue of Chineseness, which contributes to the study of how Chinese people view themselves in relation to others and to the world at large; it encourages scholars to look beyond debates about what Chineseness is to examine how it is performed, represented, and contested, and what it means to whom in certain sociopolitical circumstances, both real and virtual. This collection also addresses Chineseness as a relational concept that emerges in discourse contexts of interaction using critical sociolinguistic and discourse analytical methodologies. For example, Xiaoxiao Chen's chapter explores how Chineseness is constructed in tourism discourse by looking at how Chinese locals or hosts are represented in interactions within travel articles in the New York Times travelogues using critical discourse analysis (CDA), where discourse ‘specifically constitutes socially constructive and socially conditioned knowledge of Chinese people/Chineseness, as well as the social identities of and relationships between travel writers and Chinese locals’ (168).
Overall, this book offers a rich source of information about the project of ‘unpacking Chineseness’ (190). The variety of types of data analysed, as well as the diversity of research sites, makes this book relevant for those who are interested in Chineseness, language, and identity, as well as sociolinguistics and discourse analytical research.
