Beyond diaspora’s horizons: mass deportations to China and an alternative to the diaspora paradigm

Abstract

This essay argues for the need to look beyond “diaspora” paradigms of global Chinese historical experience, and that we may need different metaphors in order to do so. Examining the little-known history of the mass deportation of Chinese colonial subjects from Malaya to China during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), it reflects empirically on why cases like these necessitate more sensitive approaches to global Chinese experiences which resist the language of race, ancestry, lineage, homelands and origins, and attend instead to history and historical processes: to the silences of the archive and hegemonies which produce racial essentialization; to specificities of place, space and scale; and to rupture, immobility and refusal. It calls instead for the discernment of diaspora’s historically constituted horizons—and a historically grounded appreciation of what lies beyond them.