The Diaspora Collection

The Zoryan Institute is pleased to announce The Diaspora Collection, a series of publications focused on specific diaspora groups, tackling their unique themes, trends, and characteristics.

The Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective

The first book in this brand new series, titled The Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective, brings together carefully selected papers from the Institute’s academic journal, Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies, and other relevant works.

Each article analyses a distinct context within the Chinese Diaspora, allowing the reader an inside look into the unique and dynamic group which has spread widely across the globe.

Featuring three overarching areas that both shape and are shaped by the diaspora – culture, entrepreneurship, and migration – the book’s contributors present both community-level and global perspectives on the idiosyncrasies and patterns of Chinese diaspora groups.

The book also includes key thematic essays that look at diaspora from a multitude of angles, seeking to better understand the factors which shape the social, political, economic, and cultural lives of the Chinese diaspora. As Professor Lok Siu writes in her Editor’s introduction:


“This volume offers a mix of disciplinary approaches to the study of the Chinese diaspora, and the chapters cover a range of historical periods, thematic foci, and geographical sites. Without the pretense of comprehensive coverage, the volume provides a set of entry points to
understand the immense diversity that constitutes the Chinese diaspora.”

Lok Siu, Editor’s Introduction


Prof. Lok Siu, Editor

Professor Lok Siu (PhD Stanford) is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.  She is also Program Coordinator of the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies. Her award winning book, Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (Stanford U. Press), examines the politics of belonging for ethnic Chinese as they negotiate the cultural and geopolitical intersections of Panama, the United States, and China/Taiwan.  Her co-edited volumes include Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (Stanford U Press) and Gendered Citizenship: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (Palgrave Press), and her essays appear in various journals and anthologies.  She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Intimate Publics: Cultural Mixing of Asian Latinx, which examines the everyday intimacy of public culture that invokes and enacts Asian Latinx entanglements. Her research interests include diaspora, transnationalism, cultural citizenship and un/belonging, cultural politics of food, race/gender formation, Asians in the Americas, and Chinese diaspora.

Prof. Khachig Tölölyan, Editor

Professor Tölölyan is one of the founders of the field of Diaspora Studies and a founding editor of Zoryan Institute’s award-winning journal, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. He is interested in the mobility of populations and cultures, and asks how the increasing level of migration and dispersion brings new populations to the West, how these dispersions become ethnic and diasporic, and how these in turn reshape the literature, culture and politics of the nations/states that host them. World Literature, in particular global anglophone fiction, is part of his research, as are ethnicity, nationalism, transnationalism and globalization.


Featuring articles that span over three decades of scholarly research on the Chinese Diaspora, The Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the complex features of one of the oldest and most populous diaspora groups and their relationships to their homeland.

This book is an accessible and valuable text for anyone studying or interested in this increasingly important subject.