"At the heart of Lok Siu's engaging, well-researched book about Chinese Panamanians is the question of what it means to be Chinese in a diaspora. Siu makes a major contribution to international migration and Chinese oversees studies by developing the theoretical concept of 'diasporic citizenship.' Rather than taking for granted a coherent, homogenized 'Chinese diaspora,' Siu demonstrates its complexities and ... Read moredisjunctures."
Journal of Chinese Oversees "Lok Siu has written a fascinating story about the Chinese living in Panama, equally vulnerable to memories of home and the ruptures of nationalist politics. The notion of diasporic citizenship captures a kind of interstitial belonging shaped by cross-currents of culture and politics, most recently including ripples from emergent Asian powers."
Aihwa Ong
author of Flexible Citizenship, Buddha is Hiding, and Global Assemblages
Lok Sius groundbreaking ethnography, Memories of a Future Home, provides a fine analysis of the Chinese presence in Panama through a vivid series of case studies about social ruptures. This book raises questions of nation and belonging in diasporic spaces between remembered homelands and present identifications as well as among Panama, the United States, mainland China and Taiwan. Studies of citizenship, Latin America, and Asian Americans will not be the same after Sius work. What a wonderful read!"
Renato Rosaldo, Department of Anthropology
New York University
"[The] theoretical framework of this ethnography, of diasporic citizenship and the fluidity of culture and identities (albeit firmly embedded in power relations), should represent a point of departure for a fuller and perhaps more inclusive discussion of the intersections of culture and politics in the hemisphere as a whole."Journal of Latin American Studies "Memories of a Future Home is a masterful ethnography, focusing specifically on the different groups of Chinese in Panama and their ongoing negotiations regarding identity, nationality, and home. Proposing that these must be contextualized both in terms of the complexities of Panamanian politics and the global status of the country of origin, Siu makes a highly original contribution that illuminates the dynamics of cultural citizenship among 'new' and 'old' Asian immigrant populations in the Americas, as a whole."
Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, University of California "Lok Siu's investigation of the Chinese in Panama is a unique entry in the ongoing investigation of the broader, globally significant processes of migration. This work illuminates some of the major conceptual debates in contemporary scholarship. The author's theoretically informed thick description makes this manuscript sing."
Ien Ang
University of Western Sydney
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