Abstract
Contemporary political science and international relations studies take for granted the modern sovereign state as its analytical unit. To recognize a state is to fix it within its geographical borders. This statist assumption faces serious challenges from emerging cultural studies literature that problematizes the borders.1 Reducing the borders to a discursive construction supported by the power practice of those acting in the name of the state, the new literature inspects those micro-practices that use the state to serve functions as well as fulfill meanings outside the familiar scope of international relations. Unlike those political scientists who reproduce state institutions by treating the state as given, students of cultural studies deconstruct the state by approaching the issue from the perspectives of those who are supposedly loyal to the state. In the latter research strategy, the scholar no longer looks at the citizen in a top-down position presumably embedded in statism. Instead, cultural studies provide the bottom-up possibility so that the citizen can look at the state in different perspectives.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989);
Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker (eds.), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Chih-yu Shih, Navigating Sovereignty: World Politics Lost in China (London: Palgrave, 2003);
Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds.), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997).
For more discussion on how the state discursively constructs ethnic citizenship, see Stevan Harrell (ed.), Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995);
Duara Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning the Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995);
Dru Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge: Council of East Asian Studies, 1991).
To disclose the arbitrary nature of the state in determining the identities of the border community and indirectly reinforce the image of an un-problematized state. For examples of this attempt at disclosing, see Colin Mackerras, China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Mette Halskov Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese—Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999);
Gerard A. Postiglione (ed.), Chinas National Minority Education—Culture, Schooling, and Development (New York and London: Falmer Press, 1999).
For research that sees from the eyes of those under study, see Louisa Schein, Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in Chinas Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000);
Chih-yu Shih, Negotiating Ethnicity in China: Citizenship as a Response to the State (London: Routledge, 2002);
Uradyn E. Bulag, Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
For more discussion, see Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (eds.), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Christian P. Scherrer, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Violence: Conflict Management, Human Rights, and Multilateral Regimes (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003);
Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
For illustration, see the discussion by Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid (eds.), Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2001);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
Zhang Zhaohe (Cheung Siu-woo), “Local Development, National Consciousness and Folk Religion: A Case Study of a Vietnamese Community in Guangxi,” Journal of History and Anthropology 2, no.1 (April 2004): 122.
Zhang Zhaohe believes that the historically intense relationship poses a challenge to the official construction of Jing ethnicity. His historiography is based upon Yan Xuejun, “An Investigation of the Conditions of Vietnamese in Fangcheng,” in Editorial Board of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous District, An Investigation of the History and the Society of the Guangxi Jing People (Nanning: Guangxi Ethnic Press, 1987 [1953]).
Copyright information
© 2007 Chih-yu Shih
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shih, Cy. (2007). The State as a Borderline Identity—Distancing the Jing Ethnicity from Vietnam. In: Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Southwestern China: The State Turned Upside Down. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609341_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609341_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53995-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60934-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)