Making Culture Part II - Nostalgia of Exile

Week 6 - 14th August 2012

   Continued from the preceding blog, due to political, educational, and economic movements such as the Cultural Revolution and the June 4^th Incident in 1989, and the decolonization in Hong Kong, a massive number of Chinese and Hong Kong residents left and immigrant to overseas since 1980s. For these people now living outside China in the age of globalisation, how do they perceive their identity? What is the role of the different media in the making of diasporic and immigrant cultures? How do satellite television, internet, mobile phone coverage etc. create a media space that cuts across national boundaries to form a transnational space?

  Appadurai describes this group of diasporic people or immigrant community as “anguish of displacement” and the “nostalgia of exile” (Sun, 2002). It is because of they confront a complex situation in a diasporic public space, where living in-between national space vs. the homeland, such as racial differences, “foreignness” appearances, accent and behaviour; and the disconnection with China increases desirous of maintaining their regular consumption of Chinese cultures (Sun, 2002).

For example, immigrant communities (former mainland Chinese) would watch Chinese television drama series by install a satellite television. Satellite television provides an immediate access of the latest news of mainland China to former mainland Chinese; you do not have to be at a certain location or face-to-face communities to receive certain information, it is non-physical nature, also called virtual neighborhoods.

Indeed, even I am not an immigrant from Hong Kong but a temporary overseas student in Australia, I still do not like being disconnected with my homeland; I do not have a satellite television but I could purchase Chinese television drama DVDs at Chinese DVDs shop that opened by former mainland Chinese (or download from the internet), reading electronic newspapers from Hong Kong’s website, watching Chinese film at Australian cinema, talking to family on the phone with Facetime etc. to maintain my connection with my homeland; all of these media together to cut across China-Australia boundaries to form a transnational space.

  With the emerged networked, digital and mediated space of cyberspace, it is so easy for diasporic communities to form and exchange information and maintain relationships, and make new and hybridized cultural identities.

Reference: Sun, W 2002, ‘Fantasizing the homeland, the internet, memory and exilic longings’, Leaving China: media, migration, and transnational imagination, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 113–36.