Abstract
The field of Overseas Chinese studies is inextricably linked with the historical and social context of the nation-state in which the field was established. In discussing the development of historical studies of the Chinese in North America in the second half of the 20th century, this paper examines how Overseas Chinese studies was established as a specific research field and reveals the field's characteristics which are tied with the American context as a whole. From the early 1960s, Chinese immigrant intellectuals in the Canadian and American West Coast authored histories of the overseas Chinese in Chinese. These studies relied on the historical materials of Chinese immigrants and on Chinese secondary sources published under the Overseas Chinese policy of the Taiwanese KMT. From the 1970s, as part of the Asian-American movement, second generation and immigrant middle-class Chinese intellectuals established the new framework of Asian-American studies. This field proposed a scholarship which legitimated the historical experience and presence of the Asian in American society and was thus premised on Asians as American citizens. The most recent scholarship on the overseas Chinese has introduced the concept of transnationalism, which is premised on mobility, and several empirical historical studies have been produced in this field to overcome the nation-state paradigm.
