Sinophone Studies

A Critical Reader

Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, Brian Bernards

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231527101
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.

I

ISSUES AND CONTROVERSIES

Sinophone studies underscores issues and controversies pertaining to multiple identities, ethnicities, languages, and cultures in contrast to the singular and all-consuming “obsession with China.”¹ The Sinophone departs and distinguishes itself from such an obsession, as well as the dominant discourse of Chineseness, and maintains its own subjectivity with an emphasis on heterogeneous practices of language and culture of Sinophone communities in a variety of locales. As Shu-mei Shih explains:

The Sinophone peoples … are closer or farther from China, taiwan, or Hong Kong, or the other Sinophone sites in asia where they have emigrated from, depending on their perceptions of both geographical and psychic space. In their rootedness in the local place, the Sinophone peoples across different oceans and territories negotiate the relationship between space and place creatively.²

While some may continue to have both cultural and political allegiances to China, others may hold an opposite view, especially in the context of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural heterogeneity of the place where they reside. For the second generation, their birth country is more likely considered by them as their home country, and their attachment to a faraway country called China is at best tenuous, if not altogether a form of imaginary nostalgia. An immigrant mother’s and her locally born daughter’s geographical distance to China may be the same, but their relationships to the “psychic space” of China—a space closely associated with memory and imagination—are bound to be different. In other words, the Sinophone—as lived cultures as well as living languages and peoples—is spatially and temporally specific to different generations and in different locations. The Sinophone can be and is in fact many things depending on place (site of settlement) and time (history of migration). The Sinophone therefore cannot be contained by the China-centric and uniform definitions of Chineseness, as it is constantly engaged with local revisions and reinventions of Chineseness in relation to local languages and cultures. Ien Ang puts it slightly differently in her 1998 essay “Can One Say No to Chineseness?”, which remains fitting even now:

Chineseness is not a category with a fixed content—be it racial, cultural or geographical—but operates as an open and indeterminate signifier whose meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated in different sections of the Chinese diaspora.

In part I, we have included chapters that reverberate with the critics’ call to rethink—if not necessarily undo—Chineseness, which frequently appears as an identificatory category not so much to designate one’s ancestral origin but to establish and reinforce certain political affiliations. Each of these chapters serves as a unique entrance to further inquiries of issues such as immigration, identity, as well as multilingualism that have become inextricably linked to Sinophone communities and central to Sinophone studies. In her provocative chapter, Ang takes issue with the notion of “Cultural China” coined by Wei-ming Tu (see part II). While Ang acknowledges the importance of Tu’s pioneering attempt to interrogate the cultural ties of the “overseas Chinese” (Huaqiao or Huaren) to China, she also notes that Tu’s notion of Cultural China risks repeating the logics of Chinese ethnocentrism. In a culturally and economically deterritorialized space such as the world today, the title of Ang’s chapter exemplifies a certain ambiguity and ambivalence. It is both a rhetorical question and a categorical imperative, indicating that one can say no to Chineseness (but is one willing to?) on the one hand, and one must say no to Chineseness on the other simply because the definition of Chineseness (as that of all other identities) varies in different places and times. Saying no to Chineseness does not deny any ancestral or cultural ties to China; on the contrary, it is to reject the problematic assumption that Chinese studies is (limited to) the study of China or that there is a more authentic or the best definition of Chineseness. Saying no to Chineseness offers Sinophone communities in different parts of the world an opportunity to reflect on, to comment on, and to question the totalizing forces of genealogy, consanguinity, as well as the so-called “Chinese culture,” to foreground how such forces are being negotiated in different locations. And by way of extension, saying no to Chineseness further illuminates how Sinophone peoples may construct their own identity relationally. Simply put, to answer “yes” to Ang’s seemingly alarming call is not to deny the very existence of a political entity, or a civilization-state called China; rather, it is to begin thinking more theoretically about an overdetermined series of historical, cultural, or political factors behind any identity (and allegiance), as Rey Chow also does in her chapter.

In her compelling 1998 essay “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” Chow unpacks the relational construction of the Chinese and the non-Chinese. Chow’s chapter is not so much an anthropological and sociological discussion of ethnogensis as an acute critical reflection on Chinese/Chineseness that many indiscriminately use to support a “homogeneously unified, univocal China.” In response to drastic changes accompanying contacts with Western powers especially between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Chinese/Chineseness surfaces as a problematic ethnic supplement that simultaneously stresses China as an underdeveloped “other” that awaits education and improvement, and China as a particular entity whose presence complicates and enriches existing values of universality. Chow advocates a dissociation among ethnicity, race, nation, and the state by expounding on the various clashes between the “discriminatory practices of the old Western hegemony” and China’s vehement riposte to them. Chow’s reminder of how an ethnic category called “the Chinese” is operative on the levels of literary and cultural production as well as linguistic enunciation is well taken. Indeed, by the turn of the twenty-first century, Chineseness as a monolithic given linked to China has come under much interrogation and critique, but more refined critical interventions into the politics of Chineseness still await.

Shu-mei Shih’s coinage of the term Sinophone is the most recent engagement with Chineseness from the perspective of literary and cultural production. The Sinophone does more than repackage what we may call the polyphony and heteroglossia in literature and cinema from modern China that have already inspired several academic monographs. The Sinophone may be understood as a critical response to Chow’s urge to “theorize the controversial connections among language possession, ethnicity, and cultural value.” To borrow James Clifford’s famous saying, the Sinophone highlights the complex dynamics between “roots,” the invisible and at times the imaginary pulling forces of the homeland, and “routes,” the process of traveling to and settling down (planting new “roots”) in a “foreign” land.³ As Shih aptly puts in her chapter “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production,” the Sinophone is a “study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities on the margins of China and Chineseness.” On the surface, the Sinophone may appear as an exclusionary approach to China and Chinese studies—exclusionary because Shih strategically draws critical attention to cultural productions outside and beyond the geopolitical boundary of China proper. The Sinophone disengagement with China is a postcolonial splitting of a monolithic identity that is Chineseness, a move that echoes and supplements existing critical discussions as seen in the works of Ien Ang, Rey Chow, Stuart Hall, and others. In short, the Sinophone decouples Chineseness and China, bringing to the fore a critical perspectivalism and an interpretive positionality that are essential in our reconceptualization of “diaspora” (Chinese or otherwise) in the twenty-first century. Rather than arguing that the precarious center cannot hold and will one day become a new margin, the Sinophone makes clear that the center is always already the margin, thereby providing a nuanced new look at the taxonomy that old area studies employ to label “them” and “us,” enemies and allies.

The fact that the Sinophone does not engage with Han Chinese writers, intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers from China may appear puzzling to many. We may understand the Sinophone’s disengagement with mainstream cultural brokers in China in light of what Ien Ang calls “an inclusion by virtue of othering.” Insofar as the Sinophone proclaims to be focusing on the particularity of the local, it never intends a negligence of the center. Critics have already written much about the imbrications of the center and the periphery, which the Sinophone does more than repeating. Including China by virtue of othering, the Sinophone promises a refinement of existing understanding of ethnic and linguistic politics in the field of Chinese studies. And by refining the dynamics and dialectics between presence and absence, as well as writers inside and outside of China, the Sinophone further theorizes the study of China, its constituting cultures, its many peoples, and their multiplying tongues with critical perspectives.

Following the chapters by Ang, Chow, and Shih, Kim Chew Ng’s chapter focuses on the language issue. Born in Malaysia, Ng is both a noted literary critic in Taiwan and a superb fiction writer in his own right. Ng’s chapter “Sinophone/Chinese: ‘The South Where Language Is Lost’ and Reinvented” reminds the reader that in Malaysia, the standard Sinitic language (called huayu throughout Southeast Asia) is not the lingua franca of immigrants from China. Hailam, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochiu, and other languages all have a longer history in Malaysia than huayu or the putonghua (Beijing standard). Communication between people whose ancestors come from different regions and speak different topolects becomes a practice of creolization, that is, a process that mingles varied linguistic expressions, inflections, and intonations. The existing standard Sinitic characters, phrases, and idioms are simply ineffective in visualizing such vital and vibrant cross-pollination of topolects and the cultures and histories behind them. One of the many challenges a Sinophone Malaysian writer like Kim Chew Ng faces may be the difficulty to adequately express herself/himself in written words, but never a “loss of language,” as charged by Chinese writer Wang Anyi.

And the issue becomes even more complex if we are to take into account the history of “national language” and “Sinitic language” education in relation to cultural politics and anti-Chinese sentiment in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Descendants of settlers from China who speak varied Sinitic languages at home must deal with policies that are hostile to their cultural and linguistic heritages. In addition to politics related to anti-Chinese/Sinophone sentiments in their birth countries, they are also faced with the violent wrestling between opposing ideological views, namely that of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China. Both China and Taiwan attempt to advance their own political agenda and exert influence on Sinophone communities abroad by linking cultural heritage unabashedly to Mandarin (putonghua, guoyu), the official language of both sides of the Taiwan Strait, which many settlers and their descendants do not necessarily read, write, and speak.

It needs to be remarked here that the linguistic challenge of which Ng urges readers of the vernacular Sinitic script to take note is a challenge that remains prevalent well into the twenty-first century after its initial emergence during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Premodern Chinese scholars and officials were not concerned with the split between spoken and written language. It was at this important historical juncture of the May Fourth Movement that the Chinese intellectuals began to radically revamp the existing way of thinking and writing. For them, the unification of spoken and written languages marks the first step toward the reinvigoration of China and its culture in the face of pressing imperial forces from the West and Japan. At one point, progressive scholars such as Qian Xuantong and Wu Zhihui even proposed to abolish the Sinitic script and adopt the Roman alphabet. Needless to say, their proposal was dismissed. We could only imagine how it would have altered the landscape of modern Chinese literature.

To be certain, there are writers whose experience of emigration predates the May Fourth Movement. Their struggle to eke out a living in a new land was their first priority, not the use of language for nationalist causes. There is the crisis of which Ng speaks, but there are also émigré writers who strip their Sinophone writings of local influences and insist on using the classical language (wenyan wen) and poetry to document their expatriation and demonstrate their loyalty to their homeland. David Der-wei Wang’s chapter offers a historical overview of Chinese émigré writings in Taiwan from the perspective of loyalism and loyalist discourse. In this seminal chapter, Wang explains how loyalism (which is always already post-loyalism)—an age-old notion, as well as an entrenched way of life—helps to shape various structures of feeling in the contested relationship among emigrants, émigré writers, and their homeland. The writers from seventeenth-century China and Taiwan that Wang discusses continue to exert their influence on contemporary Sinophone writers much in the same way that the specters of homeland continue to haunt Chinese emigrants and their descendants. Thus studies of Sinophone Taiwan may begin from an earlier time, as David Wang’s mention of Shen Guangwen and Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) shows, to avoid suppressing the unique cultural hybridity resultant from Taiwan’s colonial pasts (from Dutch to Ming and Qing China to Japan) and, some might argue, the colonial present (under the KMT).

The issue of loyalty and loyalism is even more complex in the case of Ha Jin, an Anglophone Chinese American writer who has given up writing in his mother tongue. Jin, who teaches at Boston University, chose to write and publish stories in American English. He won his first award—the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction—in the United States in 1996 with his “Under the Red Flag.” Since then, he has continued to receive critical acclaim with captivating stories and novels. In “Exiled to English,” Ha Jin tactfully responds to Ien Ang’s call on not speaking Chinese by opening language onto a broader sociocultural terrain. Ordinarily, a person in exile tends to write in the language of the homeland from which he is banished. In Ha Jin’s case, however, as he is banished from his homeland,...