Chinese Diasporic Writers and Artists

Reimagining Identity and the Self Beyond and Without China

Kwok-kan Tam, Lily Li

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040426548
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

This book presents new and original essays that capture the enigmatic and intriguing personal and imagined worlds of Chinese writers and artists in diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Including chapters on artist-writers such as Gao Xingjian, Dai Sijie, Ha Jin and Hong Ying, Tyrus Wong, and Shen Wei, the book explores personal cross-cultural experiences through their literary and other artistic works, reflecting on their cultural identity, their native home, and their new home, the past and the present. By writing, filming, and painting about their diaspora/diasporic experience, they are writing about their selves and the traumatic experience many of them have gone through in forgetting the past, forgiving the damage, and foreshadowing a future by re-visioning their selves. Their experience represents a generation's quest for an identity of being Chinese but culturally distanced from China.

As a study of cross-cultural human experience through the lens of literature, film, and other arts, this book will not only appeal to students and scholars of Chinese diaspora studies, it will also appeal to those with an interest in Chinese literature, film, and culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Notes on Chapter Authors
• Introduction: Chinese Writers and Artists in Diaspora: Constructing the Self Beyond and Without China
• 1 Diasporic Ground, National Parallels, and Continental Divides: Resituating Chinese North American Identities in the Twenty-First Century
• 2 Aesthetic Synergy in the Art of Tyrus Wong
• 3 Domestic Life as an Allegory of Migration in Ha Jin’s Waiting
• 4 Folding and Unfolding: Evolving Cultural Identity in Shen Wei’s Modern Dance
• 5 The Home(land)less Self in Gao Xingjian
• 6 Dis/Re-Location of the Self in the Film Comrades: Almost a Love Story
• 7 Hong Kong Diasporans in Clara Law’s Autumn Moon and Floating Life
• 8 The Female Self and the Mirror in Xiaolu Guo’s Two Feature Films
• 9 Hong Ying: The Disowned Daughter Writing in Diaspora
• 10 Writing in Diaspora: Eileen Chang’s Self Writing
• 11 The Language of Survival: Linguistic Migrations in the Age of Globalization
• 12 Twentieth-Century Chinese Prisonscape and its French Exophone Articulation in François Cheng and Dai Sijie
• 13 Mirrored Self: Identity Construction in Sinophone Literature in Thailand
• Index