"The Strange and Unusual": Material and Social Dimensions of Chinese Identity

This volume examines the material dimensions of Chinese identity. This scholarship complicates the connection between commodities and identity, while it simultaneously destabilizes those very identities. The question of how material distinctions shape social experience is at the heart of contemporary identity archaeologies, and the Overseas Chinese archaeologies in this collection illuminate the challenge of how to position distinctive collectives in relation to a broader American "mainstream." The most interesting Overseas Chinese archaeologies paint a picture that rejects easy divisions between assimilation and resistance and probe how Chinese material distinctions reflect complicated accommodations along class, gender, and color lines that structured life for the Overseas Chinese.