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Book Review
Comparative/World
Adam McKeown. Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 19001936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 349. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.00.
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This is a magnificent book, a tour de force all the more impressive for being a young scholar's first work. Like other landmark works that attempt to define a new approach to historical study, this, too should be generating a buzz. It will be read, studied, and picked apart. And, rightly so, it will be much admired and probably imitated, and it will be misunderstood. All this confusion because Adam McKeown has crafted a study that looks familiar yet feels different, based on extensive research but also speculative, that perhaps over reaches in places. It is erudite, provocative, compelling, and, ultimately, successful in achieving its intended goal, which is to redefine how world history should be constructed. |
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Putting it another way, there is more than one project speaking and interacting with a multiplicity of academic audiences. McKeown's original research projectstill evident and embedded in this bookis to enlarge the boundaries of Chinese history to encompass the Chinese in the diaspora: that is, wherever Chinese people have migrated and settled. His second project is to disrupt the model of traditional migration studies that describes a simplistic, monodirectional movement from homeland to relocation in a new place and simultaneously to problematize nation-based approaches. He names this the "global approach to Chinese migration," which not only traces the global movement of people, goods, and capital but identifies transnational activities that articulate with more locally defined activities and identities. |
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