Abstract
Chinatown in New York City is one of the classic places that has been visited and revisited by scholars of different backgrounds ever since it began to emerge in the nineteenth century. This chapter seeks to apply the framework of ethnographic revisits in the longitudinal literature analysis of the major historical and contemporary studies on New York’s Chinatown. Ethnographic revisits provide a reflexive framework that encapsulates subjectivities and objectivities, endogeneity, and exogeneity, thus a useful technique in the study of space in time and place within context. By breaking down the interpretations of these works into the matrix of constructivist-realist and external-internal dimensions, this chapter contours not only the changing images of Chinatown over time in a particular context, but also deconstructs the constructivist explanations conditioned by the researchers’ theoretical lens and positionalities related with their race/ethnicities, nationalities, gender, and class.
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Yu, S. (2018). New York Chinatown Now and Then: Tracing Its Changing Images Through Literature. In: Brunn, S., Kehrein, R. (eds) Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_112-1
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