Representational politics in Chinatown: The ethnic other

This study engages with interlocking socio-cultural intra-ethnic relationships from the on-the-job perspectives of ethnic social agents involved in selling ethnic goods and services to tourists. It focuses on the narratives provided by Chicago’s Chinatown Chinese to justify their involvement in the tourism-related project of manipulating ethnic identity. In so doing, it reveals the role of social relationships and the discursive representations of those relationships, with special attention to the depictions and manipulation of ethnicity as a kind of cultural currency in the tourism exchange. By exposing these relationships, this study reveals intra-ethnic domination processes at work in an ethnic urban space of tourism; processes which, at times, serve to produce experiences of ethnic identity.