About Staff

I am currently working on two book projects.

One is on the cultural politics of “Chineseness” in the Philippines from a comparative Southeast Asian perspective. The past three decades have witnessed the resignification of (Mainland) “China” from a model of socialist revolution to a model of “Chinese” capitalism alongside the transformation of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia from economically prominent but politically disloyal and culturally problematic aliens into model “Asians” as well as patriot-entrepreneurs and increasingly vocal players in national politics. This book tracks the political, economic, cultural and ideological processes by which “Chinese” came to be historically identified with commerce and capital, selectively included in and excluded from various national imaginaries and nation-building projects, and reinvented as paradigmatic “Asians.”

The second book project, co-authored with Takashi Shiraishi and entitled Only Yesterday, looks at the region we now call “East Asia.” Encompassing both Northeast and Southeast Asia, the region has been characterized by rapid region-wide economic development that has led to the emergence of increasingly urbanized and middle-class societies, as well as the deepening and widening of gaps between urban centers and rural areas, and between urban middle classes and the urban poor.