- History, Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, China, World History, and 19 moreAsian American Studies, China studies, Transnational and World History, Modern Chinese History, History of Capitalism, Capitalism, Asia Pacific Region, Pacific History, Overseas Chinese, Cultural History, Social History, Race and Ethnicity, Globalization, Silk Road Studies, Unesco, Colonialism, Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, and Diasporasedit
- Ana Maria Candela is an independent scholar and a historian and historical sociologist of Modern China. Her research focuses on Chinese migrations and the global dimensions of Chinese history and China's social transformations. She has t... moreAna Maria Candela is an independent scholar and a historian and historical sociologist of Modern China. Her research focuses on Chinese migrations and the global dimensions of Chinese history and China's social transformations. She has taught courses on Post-Socialist China, Global China, Gender and Chinese Society, Chinese Migrations, the Pacific, Settler Colonialism, Black Lives Matter and Introduction to Sociology through the lens of the Black Radical Tradition. Her most recent work was published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Critical Asian Studies and the Journal of World-Systems Research. She is the recipient of numerous distinguished fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes.
Her current book project, "Intimate Others: Peruvian Cantonese and the Making of Overseas Chinese Nationalism, 1860s-1940s," examines how Cantonese migrants to Peru used discourses of Chinese nationalism and native place sentiments to seek justice and to position themselves as agents of modernity in the different social worlds to which they belonged. Her second book project, "The Coolie Specter: Settling and Resettling Labor in the Pacific," explores the life course of Chinese coolie laborers following their deterritorialization and reterritorialization under conditions of aging, exclusion, economic crisis and war.
Ana Maria Candela graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies and a M.A. in Developing World History from the College of Charleston, and with a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Santa Cruz.edit
This paper examines Arif Dirlik’s work on the Asia-Pacific region’s transformation into a “model region of globalization.” Writing amidst the crisis of the Social Sciences, Dirlik analyzed how global capitalism’s drive to simultaneously... more
This paper examines Arif Dirlik’s work on the Asia-Pacific region’s transformation into a “model region of globalization.” Writing amidst the crisis of the Social Sciences, Dirlik analyzed how global capitalism’s drive to simultaneously homogenize and fragment the world, a condition he termed “global modernity,” had not only restructured the Asia-Pacific region so as to meet the demands of a new flexible mode of production, but also transformed knowledge production about the world, giving way to an endless splintering of knowledge that reinforced the logics of global capitalism and foreclosed any possibility for radical critique. Drawing on Asian American studies, Pacific Studies and Indigenous Studies, which emerged in the Asian-Pacific borderlands between social activism and the academy, Dirlik called attention to the local as the primary site of inquiry and advocated for radical scholarly and activist approaches grounded in a “critical localism” against the hegemony of global cap...
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Chen Da was one of the foremost sociologists of China from the 1920s to the 1940s. His intellectual habitus took shape from the long crisis that defined Chinese intellectual life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, a period of... more
Chen Da was one of the foremost sociologists of China from the 1920s to the 1940s. His intellectual habitus took shape from the long crisis that defined Chinese intellectual life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, a period of continuous imperial assault on Chinese sovereignty. As China integrated into the capitalist world-system, neo-Confucian structures of knowledge came into question. Intellectuals took up sociology to guide China’s transition from an empire to a nation-state. Through his studies on labor, migration, and population, Chen Da contributed to the institutionalization of sociology in China. Chen sought to craft a theory of Chinese development that followed universal trajectories of progress but was also attuned to the complexity of Chinese society on the ground. Through his efforts to indigenize sociology, Chen developed a non-Marxist historical materialism, a deterritorialized and pluralistic conceptualization of China as a nation, and a theory of eugenic transf...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Chen Da was one of the foremost sociologists of China from the 1920s to the 1940s. His intellectual habitus took shape from the long crisis that defined Chinese intellectual life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, a period of... more
Chen Da was one of the foremost sociologists of China from the 1920s to the 1940s. His intellectual habitus took shape from the long crisis that defined Chinese intellectual life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, a period of continuous imperial assault on Chinese sovereignty. As China integrated into the capitalist world-system, neo-Confucian structures of knowledge came into question. Intellectuals took up sociology to guide China’s transition from an empire to a nation-state. Through his studies on labor, migration, and population, Chen Da contributed to the institutionalization of sociology in China. Chen sought to craft a theory of Chinese development that followed universal trajectories of progress but was also attuned to the complexity of Chinese society on the ground. Through his efforts to indigenize sociology, Chen developed a non-Marxist historical materialism, a deterritorialized and pluralistic conceptualization of China as a nation, and a theory of eugenic transformation centered on the concept of “mode of living.” The questions which Chen Da confronted are emblematic of the predicament faced by Chinese social scientists today, who again struggle with the dynamics of a deterritorialzied “Greater China,” rising social fragmentation, and refigured eugenic discourses and policies that aim to craft the Chinese people into ideal national subjects fit for post-socialist development.
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The contemporary era of globalization poses challenges for reimagining Asian nations once associated with the Third World as spaces within the global capitalist world. The idea of the Global South incorporates these nations into a new... more
The contemporary era of globalization poses challenges for reimagining Asian nations once associated with the Third World as spaces within the global capitalist world. The idea of the Global South incorporates these nations into a new post–cold war global imaginary, but does so in a way that recognizes the structural and social inequalities that continue to distinguish these nations from their more privileged counterparts in the Global North. The challenge of reimagining former Third World nations in the contemporary era of globalization is further complicated by the deepening of structural inequality within those nations. Growing class divides and uneven development in these nations have made it difficult to imagine Global South nations as homogenous entities. This article explores the complexities of imagining China in the era of globalization by examining a set of historical narratives: the Silk Road and qiaoxiang (sojourner villages), which emerged as strategies for situating China within new global imaginaries by re-narrating the histories of South China. Although the narratives mark a departure from nation-centered histories of the Mao era, they do not reflect a withering of the state or of nationalism in the face of globalization. Rather, they are connected to reconfigurations of the nation and state related to the challenges of managing the nation's current phase of capitalist development. By examining the ways in which these narratives are over-determined by shifting class formations, regional economic development strategies, place-based social and cultural legacies, global intellectual trends, and state interventions, which all shape South China's economic development, this article describes the function of these narratives as structures of feeling. As such, the Silk Road and qiaoxiang narratives give voice to the anxieties produced by China's opening to the capitalist world economy and attempt to reconcile the contradictions of China's current phase of economic development by rendering a complex social reality into historically recognizable forms.