ABSTRACT
This essay explores how, in contemporary Asia, “Chinese culture” becomes the raw material in imaginaries of modernity. Social imaginaries have been called the “constructed landscapes of collective aspirations …now mediated through the complex prism of modern media” (Appadurai 1990, 2). I take modernity as an evolving process of imagination and practice in particular historically situated formations. Metanarratives with different claims to truth-about culture, the people, their as-pirations-are knowledge-power systems (Foucault 1979, 1982, 1991) that construct “imagined communities” (Anderson 1982) of belonging in the modern world. Scholars have tended to study such imaginaries as the work of nation-states (Anderson 1982; Bhabha 1992; Yang 1994), but transnational
imaginaries must be taken into account as important formations in late capitalism (see Gupta 1992).
