By Isabelle Cheng (University of Portsmouth), Lara Momesso (University of Central Lancashire) and Dafydd Fell (School of Oriental and African Studies)
Academics around the world are frequently reminded by their governments, funding agencies, audiences and their own community that scholarship is not only for the pursuit of knowledge but also for making a difference to human life. Claiming that organising a conference can achieve these goals is an overstatement. Yet, hoping to facilitate a close dialogue between scholarship and activism was the rationale behind the design of our recent conference, Rethinking Transnationalism in the Global World: Contested State, Society, Border, and the People in-between (held 7-8th September 2017 at the University of Portsmouth).
This lively forum was set against our ambition of strengthening the theoretical vigour of transnationalism as a theoretical framework as well as a social phenomenon, the prevalence of which is steadily growing in East Asia. This ambition was to be realised by focusing on the significance of Taiwan and Hong Kong in the regional as well as global movements of capital, people, ideas and commodity. By applying an intersectional approach, conference participants explored issues critical to the understanding of the dual meanings of transnationalism. They included the institution of sovereignty of Taiwan, the governance of citizenship in Taiwan and China, the flow of capital, the dissemination of ideas, and the consumption of culture across the Taiwan Strait and between Taiwan and Hong Kong, the tension arising in intimacy in marriages located in Taiwan or elsewhere, the restriction of modernity on social innovation in Hong Kong, and the various forms of activism exercised at grassroots, community and transnational level.
An often overlooked dimension to transnationalism is time, or, specifically, the temporality in migrants’ transnational life. Taking transnational family experiences as a case study, Professor Brenda Yeoh, the keynote speaker and the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore, reminded us that temporality, in the sense of rhythm, liminal times, and synchronous times, significantly affect the lives of the members of these families. They often rely on, sometimes unreliable, online technology to maintain their intimate relationships across the distance between the origin and destination of the migration.
The conference delved into transnationalism by four inter-related themes:
- The institution of sovereignty and its power in exercising border control and gatekeeping of the granting of citizenship
- The flow of capital, ideas, and cultural consumption
- Intimacy and identity
- Activism in the form of advocacy movement, cultural entrepreneur, and cooperation between migrants and locals
Engaging with these themes, conference participants were able to re-evaluate the usefulness of transnationalism as an analytical approach and a phenomenon affecting the complexity of contemporary lives. Whilst they focused on the specificity of Taiwan and Hong Kong in their role as migration receivers and disseminators of concepts and ideas, they did not lose sights of how other countries around the world negotiated the challenge brought by neoliberalism to sovereignty, citizenship, intimacy and the construction of identity. They discussed how statehood and sovereignty withstand the impact of transnationalism, how the convergence of capital, the infusion of ideas, and the consumption of cultural products thrive despite the persistent stand-off between Taiwan and China, how a male Muslim’s social entrepreneur failed to shake patriarchy embedded within the South Asian community but succeeded in exposing the weakness of Hong Kong’s pride in globalisation, how the tensions experienced by a couple in their everyday life may arise not only from the intimacy in the private family domain but also from the conflict embedded in the socio-political surroundings and legislation, how transformation at individual and collective levels is facilitated by the transnational networking of social movements and advocacy groups across the state borders.
These reflections, debates and discussions would remain words on paper had they not been examined by everyday reality. This ‘reality check’ was partly carried out by the participation of activists from Taiwan and the UK. The screening of ‘See You, Lovable Strangers’, a documentary made by Tsung-lung Tsai and Ngyuen Kim Hong, recorded the survival strategy of four male and female Vietnamese migrant workers whose desertion of their contract was largely driven by the brokering fees that forced them into debt bondage. Literally taken to the agricultural field in the mountain ridge of central Taiwan, conference participants witnessed the unfolding, amongst four men and women, of the endurance, the relationship, the once only outing to the beach, and the consequences of success and failure of escaping from a police raid. The making of this documentary itself is an extension of the two directors’ commitment to raising the public awareness of the enslaving of brokerage and the negligence of the governments of Taiwan and Vietnam.
The plight of escape from deprivation and fear was also the theme of the life story of Hong Dam, a Chinese Vietnamese visual artist and poet. Leaving Haiphong under another person’s identity with her families after the breakout of the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, Hong Dam joined the hundreds of thousands of Boat People who were ‘processed’ as refugees in Hong Kong before being relocated to the UK. Her metaphor of dandelion visualised her rite of passage from being a young girl refugee to being a mother of two who finally can live in peace with her identity as a refugee. Hong Dam’s reflection of her journey was projected by her art work of Childhood Dreams that was on display at the conference.
Yi-jiun Bai, the former Chinese-language editor of Bao Bon Phuong (四方報), reviewed the birth, growth and branching out of the monthly bilingual newspapers published in Chinese as well as Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian and Tagalog. The participation of multinational editors in five different languages made this a partnership between migrants and local activists for making the marginalised outsiders seen and heard. The published correspondence between a son and his mother, a Vietnamese cleaner who was a professional journalist prior to migration, revealed the degree of de-skilling of migrant workers and the growing reliance of the family on her remittance. To secure the absent mother’s regular remittance, the son advised his mother not to ‘run away’; yet ironically the expectation of regular remittance became the driving force for her eventual runaway. Conference participants were left to wonder about her whereabouts.
Thanks to the support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, we were able to offer such a forum where academics and activists learnt from each other’s expertise, experiences, strategies and struggle for recognition. At this conference, research on transnational movements of people, capital, idea and commodity, and crossing the disciplines of geography, international relations, politics, gender studies, sociology, and anthropology, was presented. At the same time, the screening of ‘See You, Lovable Strangers’ vividly displayed the violence of sovereignty, the exploitation of capitalism, the toxic sense of jealousy, the bitterness of the sense of guilt, and the frustration of unachieved dreams. The life story told by Hong Dam conveyed the precariousness of the flight from persecution and the lingering negotiation with the identity of being a ‘refugee’. The overview of Bao Bon Phuong demonstrated how migrants’ desire of being seen and heard can come true with the help of committed activists. These presentations reminded the conference participants that their research subjects are humans of flesh and blood whose life is conditioned by how the institution of sovereignty and capitalism is maintained and exercised for certain interests.