ABSTRACT
Chinatown has long been a complex and prototypical site for the study of Asian American racialisation in Asian American Studies. In literary and cultural studies, the racialised character of Chinatown manifests itself most poignantly in representations of Chinatown as Orientalist spectacles,1 and in the form of stereotypical images of the Chinese, as figures of the mysterious and unknown. In her study on Vancouver’s Chinatown, Kay Anderson argues quite forcefully that Chinatown is a discursive construction, an idea of place that is coterminous with ideas of race. The idea of Chinatown, like ideas of race, relies on representations, cultural assumptions and institutions (as well as the complicity of the community) that give these ideas legitimacy. Moreover, these ideas are for the most part a ‘European creation’:2 ‘Chinatown is a social construction with a cultural history and a tradition of imagery and institutional practice that has given it a cognitive and material reality in and for the West.’3 White Europeans used Chinatown to produce, reproduce and manage popular notions of the Chinese. And because racialisation (the making of racial categories) and place formation are mutually constitutive and enforcing acts, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Chinatown’ became interchangeable terms in the popular imaginary.
