Aihwa Ong Special Interests

I grew up in a Straits Chinese family in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia. My B.A. was from Barnard College (1970) and PhD. in Anthropology from Columbia University (1982). My work explores a series of entanglements in the contemporary worlds of the Asia-Pacific.

My first book studies the impact of runaway factories on female labor in the global peripheries. Spirits of Resistance & Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia 1987, focuses on the profound tensions produced by industrial surveillance on young Muslim women in off-shore assembly plants. Spirit possession became both an expression of distress and resistance on the shopfloor. The work is considered a classic ethnography on the globalization of high-tech factories in the developing world.

A follow-up volume, Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Labor Politics in Southeast Asia, 1995 (co-editor Michael Peletz), takes a broader view of women's agency in the region.

As a doubly-displaced immigrant, I study experiences of transnationalism and uncertainties of citizenship as a human condition. Ungrounded Empires: the Cultural Politics of Chinese Transnationalism, 1997 (co-editor Don Nonini) is a collection that tracks the multiple flows of peoples from the Chinese continent who played a major role in building the frontiers of capitalism in Asia, Australia, and North America. The volume blazed the trail for an interdisciplinary field of Chinese transnationalism.

During the late 1990s, I often visited in Hong Kong where people awaited the impending return to Chinese rule (1997) with trepidation. Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality, 1999, grew out of interviews I made among business migrants who frantically searched for overseas refuge to secure their money and families. Their strategic manipulation of immigration regimes in liberal democracies expresses a transnational ethos that celebrates flexibility, not fixity, as the value to strive for when it comes to national belonging. The flexible use of visas becomes an insurance strategy that allows entrepreneurs to work in booming China while securing their families in the West. In turn, liberal democracies grew more flexible with immigration criteria by creating investor visas for Pacific Rim migrants. Flexible Citizenship, which received an Association of Asian American Studies book award, is an influential work on citizenship in a time of globalization.

While applying for American citizenship myself, I conducted itinerant fieldwork among Cambodian refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area. I explored the subjective experience of citizenship by looking at everyday interactions between service workers and Cambodian refugees. Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, 2003 views citizenship as a process of subject-making and self-making. The book identifies the American racial continuum along which ethnic minorities are socially located, as either closer to the white or black poles.

Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, 2005 (co-editor Stephen Collier) argue that emerging global milieus are crystallized by the conjuncture of global and local elements. Indeed, rapidly emerging contexts shaped by capitalism, technology, and science proliferate in Asia, the arena of my research.

I investigated neoliberalism not as a total condition but as a mode of thinking and practicing governing for optimal outcomes. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, 2006 explores the uneven adoption of neoliberal strategies by Asian states. One striking example is the establishment of spaces of exception such as free trade zones to attract capital flows as well as cede control to overseas corporations. The political patterning on the ground is a situation I call "graduated sovereignty."

Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (co-editor Li Zhang) 2008 draws together studies of the uneven implementation of privatization and neoliberal ethos of self-enterprise as a process of Chinese socialist experimentation.

Mega-cities have become the symbols of growing Asian nations. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments with the Art of Being Global, 2011 (co-editor Ananya Roy) challenges reigning models of "the global city" by highlighting the roles, aspirations, and speculations of emerging nation-states.

Rising Asia is also home to growing expertise in biotechnology and genomic science. Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate, 2010 (co-editor Nancy N. Chen), assembles works by young scholars on the importance of biomedical sciences to national image and nation-building in India and China.

Fungible Life: Experiment in the City of Life, 2016 is an ethnographic study of genomic science, biocapitalism, and Asian identities in Singapore. Distinctive features of biological life in Asia are made fungible as potential biomedical profits, but also as collective values of identity and difference in Asia.

My current writings investigate the politics of contemporary Asian art in Western museums. I also explore the material, political and aesthetic impact of Chinese mega-infrastructure in Southeast Asia.