Mediating Old and New Chinatowns: Comparing European and American Imaginaries

• In Event: Chinatowns as Global Intersections: Lessons from Contact, Communication and Change

Abstract

Chinatowns have become iconic sites in global media, whether portrayed by non-Chinese as exotic sites of dangerously seductive otherness or seen, more often by Chinese consumers, as footholds of hope and havens in a global journey. These narratives constitute highly-localized and diverse traditions, informed by host and immigrant dialogues over time: Chinatowns occupy different cultural spaces in Bangkok, Paris, Havana and Vancouver. Yet mediations also flow across global venues as Western and Chinese images of the places of the other are shared and interpreted through networks of print, visual media, cinema, television and digital formats. This means that even as new Chinatowns emerge as sites of concrete human interaction, mutual understandings (and mis-understandings) have an important impact on expectations and changes.

Our paper uses the well-studied representations of Chinatowns in North American narratives (journalism, fiction, academics), film and internet as a foundation to explore emergent but connected depictions of European Chinatowns surrounding new migrant enclaves in Spain and Italy. We underscore both the shared (and derivative) themes that often serve to set Chinatowns apart as places and the dialogues and representations that humanize, individualize and nuance place and experience. The role of media stereotypes, the meaning of place, the emergence of complex voices (especially in second generation populations) and the identification of points of shared experience and political-economic concerns around immigration, family, heritage and opportunity evoke issues that unite and differentiate Chinatowns as imagined places worldwide.

Authors

• Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, College of Staten Island, CUNY

• Gary Wray McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College