Book: Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness

Just published: Cathryn H. Clayton, "Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness" (Harvard University Press, March 2010):

www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CLASOV.html

Publisher's description: "How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. As the Portuguese administration prepared to transfer Macau to Chinese control, it mounted a campaign to convince the city's residents, 95 percent of whom identified as Chinese, that they possessed a 'unique cultural identity' that made them different from other Chinese, and that resulted from the existence of a Portuguese state on Chinese soil. This attempt sparked reflections on the meaning of Portuguese governance that challenged not only conventional definitions of sovereignty but also conventional notions of Chineseness as a subjectivity common to all Chinese people around the world. Various stories about sovereignty and Chineseness and their interrelationship were told in Macau in the 1990s. This book is about those stories and how they informed the lives of Macau residents in ways that allowed different relationships among sovereignty, subjectivity, and culture to become thinkable, while also providing a sense of why, at times, it may not be desirable to think them."

Excerpt: "By most standards, Macau is tiny. As of 1998, it covered a land area of just under 24 square kilometers (about nine square miles), but most of its population lived on the 3.5-square-mile peninsula, whose length and breadth it was possible to cover in the space of an afternoon walk. With a total population of approximately 450,000, Macau had the highest population density in the world. [...] In the eyes of Beijing and the world, it seemed, Macau was little more than an afterthought to its larger, more prosperous, and betterknown neighbor Hong Kong, which had preceded Macau in 'returning' to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997."

Review: "Cathryn H. Clayton [...] presents Macau as an alternative to the modern state, which she blames for the 20th century's instability and violence. [...] She suggests Macau's overlapping sovereignty limited power, creating a system where 'no state, indeed no single institution, could assert authority over all aspects of public (or, for that matter, private) life.' She believes this allowed freedoms to flourish. Finally, Ms. Clayton asserts that Macau's confusion and contradiction really represent peaceful coexistence. In that, she sees 'sparks of utopian potential.'" (Jillian Melchior, "Wall Street Journal")

Cathryn H. Clayton is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii.