SESSION: Chinatowns in Global Imagination

Chinatown represents a crucial space in the global circulation of Chinese culture. From Chinese cafés across Europe and the US to barrios chinos in Latin America and the Caribbean, these enclaves have long functioned as sites of both cultural adaptation and negotiation, as well as stages for the everyday performance of identity. Exotic, commodified, and continuously reimagined, these districts are reconstituted through the histories of migration and racialization.

This panel invites contributions that interrogate the sensory, spatial, and artistic dimensions of Chinatown as an aspect of the global diaspora. In what ways do Chinese restaurants and streetscapes respond to the complexities of displaced culture, racialized urban space, and the commodification of nostalgia? Whether through subtle gestures such as menus tailored to local taste, stylized service rituals to entice customers, or eccentric Chinoiserie décor designed to evoke authenticity, these spaces project and reproduce cultural images that share collective memories and offer glimpses of living traditions often influenced by colonial legacies.

We welcome contributions that engage with representations of Chinatowns—past and present, real and imagined in literature and art. Possible case studies include: the Chinese pavilions at the nineteenth-century world fairs; the 1949 Mexican movie Café de Chinos; the board game Chinatown (2014); Grazia Ting Deng’s book Chinese Espresso (2024); or the recent novel Chinatown by Oh Jung-hee (2025). Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged, especially from art history, visual culture, urban studies, postcolonial theory, and food anthropology.

Session Convenors:

Diana Cao, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Speakers:

Cheng Chen, Ithaca College & University of Virginia

Chinatowns in the Global South: An Alternative Imagination and Network of Floating Expats

Is Chinatown in Manhattan a one-size-fits-all model for Chinese overseas diasporic patterns and spatial production? This paper challenges the conventional understanding of Chinatowns as products of South-to-North migration by examining an emerging diasporic geography within the Global South itself. While existing scholarship predominantly focuses on Chinatowns in developed countries as sites of settlement and racialized urban negotiation, contemporary Chinese migration to Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America reveals fundamentally different spatial and social dynamics.

Driven by China’s infrastructure investments and expanding manufacturing networks across developing economies, a new generation of Chinese expatriates—primarily work-based, temporary, and economically motivated—inhabit a perpetual state of “floating” rather than settling. Unlike traditional diaspora communities seeking permanent resettlement in more developed societies, these migrants operate within liminal spaces, suspended between homeland and host country.

Through comparative analysis of Chinatowns in the Global North and South, this paper examines how systematic factors—including China’s Belt and Road engagements, distinctive socio-spatial organizations of expatriate communities, and concerns over children’s education—actively discourage naturalization. Drawing on fieldwork, spatial analysis, archival research, and self-authored literature by expatriates (diaries, memoirs, and biographical accounts), I investigate multiple case studies across African and Latin American Chinatowns.

These emerging enclaves function less as permanent cultural settlements and more as transient arenas for economic opportunism, where the commodification of Chinese identity serves pragmatic rather than nostalgic purposes. This alternative imagination of Chinatown reveals how contemporary globalization reconfigures diasporic space beyond traditional North-South trajectories, creating networks of perpetual mobility rather than settlement.

Chenxi Chen, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Revisiting the Basement Workshop: Art, Community, and the Changing Site of Chinatown

The Basement Workshop (1971–1986) was an Asian American artist-activist collective that emerged in New York’s Chinatown during a period of profound social transformation. Amid civil rights activism and Asian American identity movements, Chinatown was expanding under new immigration policies while its residents remained marginalized within mainstream culture. The collective was comprised of artists, writers, and community organizers committed to cultural empowerment and social justice.

This study addresses the following questions: How did the Basement Workshop interact with New York’s Chinatown? How did art serve as a tool to amplify the community and articulate Asian American identity? Conversely, how did a culturally hybrid and complex site such as Chinatown shape and influence the artistic creations? How does this model of cultural fusion inform contemporary practice?

The paper argues that the Workshop functioned as a vital site of cultural negotiation where art reshaped the relationship between creative practice and community. Methodologically, it combines archival and oral history research with visual and cross-cultural analysis of different art forms. The Workshop’s initiatives, including the artist book Yellow Pearl (1972) and Bridge Magazine (1971–1979), reveal how artistic practice was embedded within the neighbourhood’s everyday life, transforming art into a means of community building, education, and activism. Contrasting this legacy with today’s New York Chinatown, where commercial galleries proliferate yet grow increasingly separate from the community, the research highlights how grassroots art spaces might once again serve as cultural bridges in a globalized era.

Qiang Hu, University of California San Diego

The Color of Surburban Chinatown

The construction of Chinatown in the United States was initiated as boundaries to maintain the Chinese population during a time of intense racism against their settlement and rights to gain legal status. Through generations’ effort, the Chinatowns have evolved into dynamic spaces of cultural negotiation and reinvention. Yet their physical sites have undergone multiple rounds of transformation in both form and function. One of the most significant shifts has been the “migration” of later generations of Chinese Americans, moving away from the centre of Chinatown toward suburban areas and transforming a new landscape. By focusing on the photography series Suburban Chinatown by Jessica Chou, this paper explores a possible new meaning of Chinatown that is reconfigured beyond its historical and spatial boundaries, and in this case, in Southern California, Monterey Park. In this paper, the discussion on the historical Chinatown in the nearby location of Los Angeles is used to examine how the formation of Chinatown reflects and participates in the redefinition of belonging, identity, and community formation; therefore, aligning parallel needs and meanings that place the two locations together.

Rather than displacing the historical meaning of Chinatown, this paper proposes to expand and enrich contemporary shifts in culture, aesthetics, and population that were formed without a clear boundary and the same historical support. Through Chou’s photographs, Chinatown emerges not as a static place but as a fluid concept, an evolving expression of diasporic experience among Chinese Americans.

Xin Peng, University of Cambridge

Chinese Telephone Exchange: Cultural Memory and Popular Imagination of San Francisco’s Chinatown

Not silenced nor erased from official archives, the Chinese Telephone Exchange hovers on the margin of cultural memory of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the history of Chinese America, appearing as fragments of facts and images, fetishized and fossilized as self-explanatory evidence of a bygone era. This paper starts with an overview of the history of the Chinese Telephone Exchange, a tourist landmark famous for its extraordinary telephone operators who were multilingual and memory experts. Regularly featured in the U.S. mass media in the first half of the twentieth century, the exchange closed in 1949 due to transition to automatic dialling. But years after its closure, television programs and theatrical short films still presented reenactments of the exchange’s operations to curious audiences. Not until the late twentieth century did Chinese Americans themselves start to intervene in the popular imagination of this unique site of telecommunications.

This paper focuses on Martin Wong’s 1992 painting, Chinese Telephone Exchange, and Lisa See’s 2014 novel, China Dolls, in their reimaginations of the telephone office. While China Dolls resorts to the site as an embodiment of historicity, the background against which the Asian American women rebel and exert their agencies as nightclub dancers, Wong’s painting—modelled after a popular photograph circulated in the press and as postcards—reveals a Chinatown steeped in a complex sense of nostalgia where authentic memory and identity become indistinguishable from mass-produced orientalist iconographies and myths. A focus on the representations of the Chinese Telephone Exchange sheds light on the indispensable yet often neglected role of communications technologies in shaping the cultural memory and global imagination of Chinatowns.