THE SPECTACULAR RISE OF CHINA AS A SUPERPOWER PERHAPS ONLY
NOW COMPELS US TO RECALIBRATE EXISTING DISCOURSES OF EMPIRE
and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern
sense since the mid–eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands
north and west of “China proper.”1 his history has been largely hidden
from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization
of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing
discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires.
he rise of China would not have caught so many by surprise if our
vision had not been persistently clouded by our privileging of the oceanic
(i.e., Western) mode of colonial expansion, which paradoxically
centered the West as the most deserving object of critical attention
and intellectual labor. It also would not have been a surprise if we had
looked back at the Manchu conquests of inner Asia, which presentday
China largely inherited and consolidated in a continuous colonial
project. Postcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of
orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider
how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism
and orientalism easily slip into an unrelective nationalism,
whose lip side may be a new imperialism. he Chinese discourse of
victimhood sufered at the hands of Western empires, oten bordering
on victimology, has efectively displaced this unrelective nationalism,
even though that victim experience had a limited scope and
duration in the imperial history of the Manchu empire and its successors,
the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China.
he entity we know today as China has inherited or recolonized the
vast majority of the territories conquered by the Manchu, such as Tibet,
Xinjiang (literally, “new dominion”), and Inner Mongolia, not to
mention Manchuria, more than doubling “China proper.” Now when
China proclaims its supreme concern for “territorial integrity” from a
putatively postcolonial standpoint against earlier Western imperialist
aggressions, it is simultaneously making imperial claims on the territories
annexed from the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians.
the changing profession
The Concept of the
Sinophone
shu-mei shih
SHU-MEI SHIH is professor of comparative
literature, Asian languages and cultures,
and Asian American studies at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Her
most recent works include The Creolization
of Theory (Duke UP, 2011) and Sinophone
Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia
UP, forthcoming), both as a coeditor.
1 2 6 . 3 ]
[ © 2011 by the modern language association of america ] 709
We need to bring to light the longstanding
but marginalized critical tradition
that critiques the hegemony and homogeneity
of “Chineseness” now more than
ever.2 Writers and artists on the multifarious
margins in China and outside have critiqued
China-centrism and the hegemonic
call of Chineseness, considered as colonial
impositions or arbiters of identity. his critical
tradition has been subject to ideological
censorship in China, but, surprisingly, it has
confronted a worse fate outside China: invisibility
and insigniicance, despite its powerful
articulations. Lingering letist romanticism
about socialist China in the United States
along with the political and economic need
of the hypercapitalist state to appease China
has dealt this tradition a sot blow: ignoring
it has made it irrelevant.
Across ethnic minority communities in
China, which are non-Han and hence not
deemed authentically Chinese and for which
the so-called Chinese language—the language
of the Han, Hanyu—is a colonialist imposition,
being “Chinese” is oten merely a designation
of nationality on one’s passport, not an
index to one’s culture, ethnicity, or language.
Ethnic minority cultural workers—there are
fifty-five officially recognized minorities in
China—have positioned themselves on the
margins of Chineseness for a long time, as
long as their communities have been incorporated
into China. There are many internal
colonies in China, some euphemistically
called autonomous areas, whose boundaries
are arbitrary and whose autonomy is largely
in name only. he withering of local cultures,
languages, and religious practices is there for
all to witness, as in recent unrest in Tibet and
Xinjiang. In southwestern China, entire ethnic
villages today have been designated tourist
villages, where the local inhabitants dress
up as authentic natives and their homes are
open for the pleasure of tourists. here can be
no more extreme commodiication of everyday
life than when a person’s ethnic self and
everyday activities, such as eating, walking,
drinking, and washing, constitute work that
brings in tourist dollars.
Sinophone writers and artists around the
world, in Southeast Asia, Australia, Taiwan,
the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere, have
sought to resist the suturing call of Chineseness
from China. his has gone hand in hand
with their search for local identities, which
are also oten at odds with locally dominant
nationalist, colonialist, or racialist paradigms.
On the one hand, the assignation of such racial
identities as “Chinaman,” “chino,” and
“heathen chinee” has prevented immigrants
from China and their descendants from becoming
fully accepted in their adopted lands.
Yellow-peril racism in the Western hemisphere
has thereby risked pushing immigrants
from China and their descendants into
the embrace of China. On the other hand, the
Chinese state has efectively and continuously
disseminated the ideological category of the
(“overseas Chinese”) who shall always
remain loyal to China, exploiting racist
injuries to their feelings or other forms
of alienation that can be easily transigured
into long-distance nationalism for the beneit
of China. It is no accident that the Chinese
state refers to the overseas Chinese with the
same term that the French state applies to its
departments and territories “overseas” (outremer):
China sees the overseas Chinese as subjects
who must be loyal to the motherland just
as the French state lays claim to its overseas
departments and territories.
Sinophone studies—conceived as the
study of Sinitic-language cultures on the margins
of geopolitical nation-states and their
hegemonic productions—locates its objects
of attention at the conjuncture of China’s internal
colonialism and Sinophone communities
everywhere immigrants from China have
settled. Sinophone studies disrupts the chain
of equivalence established, since the rise of
nation-states, among language, culture, ethnicity,
and nationality and explores the pro-
710 The Concept of the Sinophone [ P M L A
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tean, kaleidoscopic, creative, and overlapping
margins of China and Chineseness, America
and Americanness, Malaysia and Malaysianness,
Taiwan and Taiwanness, and so on, by
a consideration of speciic, local Sinophone
texts, cultures, and practices produced in and
from these margins. Sinophone Tibetan literature
and Sinophone American literature are
two examples in an expansive consideration
of Sinophone studies in literature. If the critical
operation of Sinophone studies involves
a trenchant critique of China-centrism, it
equally involves a critique of Eurocentrism
and other centrisms, such as Malay-centrism
in Malaysia. It is, in short, always a multidirectional
critique.
In the past few years, scholars have used
the term Sinophone for largely denotative purposes
to mean “Chinese-speaking” or “written
in Chinese.” Sau-ling Wong used it to designate
Chinese American literature written in
“Chinese” as opposed to English (“Yellow”);
historians of the Manchu empire such as Pamela
Kyle Crossley, Evelyn S. Rawski, and Jonathan
Lipman described “Chinese-speaking”
Hui Muslims in China as Sinophone Muslims
as opposed to Uyghur Muslims, who speak
Turkic languages; Patricia Schiaini-Vedani
and Lara Maconi distinguished between Tibetan
writers who write in the Tibetan script
and “Chinese-language,” or Sinophone, Tibetan
writers. Even though the main purpose
of these scholars’ use of the term is denotative,
their underlying intent is to clarify contrast
by naming: in highlighting a Sinophone Chinese
American literature, Wong exposes the
anglophone bias of scholars and shows that
American literature is multilingual; Crossley,
Rawski, and Lipman emphasize that Muslims
in China have divergent languages, histories,
and experiences; Schiaini-Vedani and
Maconi suggest the predicament of Tibetan
writers who write in the “language of the
colonizer” (Schiaini-Vedani 89) and whose
identity is bound up with linguistic difference.
Building on these denotative meanings,
which describe both ethnic minority cultures
in China and cultures of settlement and immigration
outside China,3 this paper blows
open the concept of the Sinophone to explore
its historical content, its linguistic multiplicity,
and its theoretical potentialities.
Historical Processes
hree interrelated historical processes have produced
Sinophone communities: continental colonialism,
settler colonialism, and immigration.
Continental Colonialism
Unlike the colonies of modern European empires,
largely established overseas, China’s
colonies are internal, products of what I call
“continental colonialism.” In the last iteen
years or so, American historians of China
have led the way in documenting, analyzing,
and theorizing the history and nature of the
Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911) as an inner
Asian empire in a historiography called
the “new Qing history.” Their meticulous
research on Qing military conquest and colonial
administration over vast areas in the
west and the north has proved that the Qing
was an inner Asian empire since around the
mid–eighteenth century, similar to Western
empires and with important consequences for
how we view present-day China from a longer
historical perspective.4 he failure to recognize
the Qing as a colonial empire or to see
China today as the successor or executor of
empire is due to two misreadings of history.
he irst misreading results from an uncritical
acceptance of the nationalist historiography
of modern China as victim, an idea
propagated by the Chinese state. In this historiography,
Chinese history since the Qing is
nothing but a series of opium wars, unequal
treaties, Western imperial acts of aggression,
and China’s relentless search for sovereignty
under duress. he Qing’s territorial expansion
since the eighteenth century is relegated
1 2 6 . 3 ] Shu-mei Shih 711
thechangingprofession
to an old, insignificant chapter of history.
Modern history therefore begins in the mid–
nineteenth century with the opium wars,
not the eighteenth century, when the Qing
conquered and meticulously administered
vast areas of inner Asia using such methods
as military and economic subjugation,
religious assimilation, gendered pedagogy,
and effective management of multilingualism,
multiculturalism, and ethnic pluralism
(Waley-Cohen). The fact that the Qing was
ruled by the Manchu, not the Han, is a useful
historical detail that can suggest that the Han
did not dirty their hands in the conquest. But
when claiming the conquered areas in the
name of “territorial integrity,” Han Chinese
historians then used the sinicization thesis to
authenticate the claims: the Manchu were so
sinicized that they practically became Han;
hence, modern, Han-dominant China is the
legitimate heir to those territories. Drawing
from interpretations whatever served Han
claims best when the need arose (each claim
sufused with the ressentiment of the victim),
nationalist historians relegated Qing conquest
to the dustbin of history.
The second misreading has to do with
the geography of Qing expansion. he models
of modern empires have been European
and oceanic, whereas Qing expansion was
non-European and occurred largely on the
continental land mass. “European” attributes
connoting superiority, rationality, and
enlightenment, which Europe had reputedly
spread through its colonial enterprises,
could not be applied to non-Western powers;
hence, Qing expansionism could not have
been a colonial empire in the modern sense.
A case that illustrates this well is Hegel’s ingenious
linking of Europeanness with the sea:
“he European state is truly European only
in so far as it has links to the sea.” Europe’s
maritime principle is the means for European
dominance, whereas Asia, for which
“the sea is without signiicance,” was limited
by its land-locked status (Lectures 196). he
maritime principle—the embracing of “lux,
danger, and destruction”—brings to fulillment
the European drive to “found” colonies
and is therefore the basis of European colonialism.
Lacking an “outlet” for “life to step
beyond itself,” the Asiatic by deinition could
not found colonies and become empires (Philosophy
247–49).
China, of course, had a long maritime
history before the modern period (e.g.,
Levathes; So; Wang and Ng; Pomeranz and
Topik), but the crucial issue here is the misreading
of colonial expansion as necessarily
oceanic and never continental, banishing
Chinese empire to the category of premodern
or dynastic empires. Boldly expansionist,
the continental colonialism of the Qing more
than doubled the territory of “China proper,”
and this superenlarged territorial boundary
was consolidated by the People’s Republic of
China (established in 1949), with the exception
of Outer Mongolia. While during the
Republican period (1911–49) Tibet and Xinjiang
seemed only symbolically connected
to China, the People’s Republic of China recolonized
them and brought them under direct
Chinese administration. he Qing was a
self-consciously multilingual empire, whose
official languages were Manchu, Hanyu,
Mongolian, Tibetan, and sometimes Arabic
and Uyghur. The linguistic colonization of
Tibet and Xinjiang was initiated only with the
proclamation of the People’s Republic. he reduction
of bilingual education in these areas
today, prompting recent protests, indexes the
intensiication of linguistic colonization.
The recognition of reconsolidated Chinese
empire brings attention to the diversity
of ethnicities and languages within its borders.
Hence, the new Qing history, with its
interest in interethnic relations in the empire,
has practically engendered an ethnic turn in
Chinese historical studies. Sinophone minority
literature in China is situated at the intersections
between ethnicities and languages.
Mongols, Manchu, Tibetans, and many other
712 The Concept of the Sinophone [ P M L A
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ethnic peoples in China today often speak
more than one language. hey are Sinophone
to the extent that they speak and write in the
standard language of the Han, which they
willingly acquire or have imposed on them.
he historical minorities such as those in the
southwestern border areas also are multilingual
communities that resist or adapt to Han
Chinese assimilation to different degrees.
Sinophone studies foregrounds this continuous
history of the continental empire from
the Qing to the present.
Settler Colonialism
The places where many immigrants from
China settled and became either the majority
population (as in Taiwan and Singapore)
or a large minority population (as in Malaysia),
around whom Sinophone communities
formed, can be considered settler colonies in
a speciic sense. hese settler colonies roughly
parallel those of the British in North America,
Australia, and New Zealand. he British
settlers of these lands are not diasporic subjects
of their home empires but colonizers of
indigenous peoples. To frame their history in
terms of diaspora is a displacement and disavowal
of colonial violence and its attendant
cultural genocide. Settler colonialism was the
dark underside of the so-called diaspora of
imperial subjects. Diaspora as history (dispersal
of peoples) and diaspora as value (a
way of looking at and being in the world) are
contradictory and need to be decoupled when
it comes to settler colonialism.
The point here is that the notion of a
“Chinese diaspora” is equally a form of displacement,
on two counts. First, it masks the
present condition of colonialism. In Taiwan
the indigenous Austronesian peoples have
lived under serial colonialism (the colonists
are the Han Chinese who settled there
since the seventeenth century, becoming
the present-day Taiwanese and Hakkas; the
Dutch; the Japanese; and the Han Chinese
again in the second wave of settlement in
the late 1940s) continuously for several centuries—they
have never been postcolonial.
The framework of “Chinese diaspora” also
masks past conditions of something similar
to settler colonialism in Southeast Asia,
where some Han Chinese settlers established
independent satraps on the lands of the indigenous
peoples before the arrival of European
colonizers and where many Han immigrants
were later employed by the French, the Dutch,
and the British as tax farmers and plantation
managers, producing a layered middleman
society, or middleman settler colonialism
(Shih, “heory”).
Second, disapora as value implies loyalty
to and longing for the ancestral “home,”
which bind the disaporic to the so-called
homeland. It ties the Han in Taiwan and
Southeast Asia to the Chinese “homeland”
even ater centuries and presumes their cultural
dependence, if not political dependence,
on China. his diaspora framework has also
perpetuated the category of the “overseas
Chinese,” who respond to the call of a Chineseness
so narrowly deined that it becomes
quantiiable: one can be more Chinese or less
Chinese (Wang Gungwu). But the fact of the
matter is that a signiicant percentage of Han
Taiwanese, though settler colonizers, do not
consider themselves Chinese despite the ideology
of “territorial integrity” promulgated on
both sides of the Taiwan Strait. China bombastically
claims that Taiwan is its own, and
Taiwan fearfully rejects this claim. he Han
settlers who started arriving in Malaya—geographically
encompassing today’s Malaysia
and Singapore—in the seventh century and
whose migration there peaked in the nineteenth
century also consider themselves not
overseas Chinese but locals. Sinophone writers
and critics there launched several major
debates and campaigns throughout the twentieth
century to resist the call of Chineseness
and the Chinese state’s resinicization pressures.
I have therefore argued that diaspora
1 2 6 . 3 ] Shu-mei Shih 713
thechangingprofession
has an expiration date; one cannot say one is
diasporic ater three hundred years, and everyone
should be given a chance to become a
local (Visuality and “Against Diaspora”).
In the first sense critical of diaspora as
value in settler colonialism, then, indigeneity
is foregrounded to expose the narcissism
of those settler subjects who try to pass as
diasporic subjects. In Sinophone indigenous
literature from Taiwan, writing in two languages
takes on a particular twist since most
of the indigenous languages do not have written
scripts. his literature oten enacts a clash
of sounds rather than a clash of scripts, as the
writers try to register their anticolonial intent
by importing indigenous sounds into the dominant
script. In the second sense critical of diaspora
as value, the emphasis is on localization
in opposition both to the Chinese state’s calling
of its “overseas” subjects into its fold and
to the postcolonial state’s systematic refusal of
its minorities’ claims on the nation, as in the
case of Chinese Malaysians in Malaysia. he
combined force of China’s pressure and the local
nation’s refusal is a classic example of what
Ling-chi Wang has called, in reference to Chinese
Americans, the “structure of dual domination.”
Sinophone Malaysian writers have
been writing under this dual domination for
well over a hundred years, traversing the trajectory
from settlers to middlemen to locals.
(Im)Migration
In countries where immigrants from China
are a minority, such as most countries in
the Western hemisphere, we find minority
Sinophone communities. As the Han have
migrated over centuries (as coolies, laborers,
students, or capitalists) and become an ethnicized
and racialized minority, their maintenance
and creolization of their various Sinitic
languages and cultures—predominantly
Cantonese and Minnan (Teochew, Hokkien,
etc.) in earlier periods and Mandarin today—
constitute the basis for the study of Siniticlanguage
cultures outside China. he United
States, Britain, Germany, Australia, Canada,
and so on, in which old immigrants localize
even as new immigrants replenish Sinophone
culture, have seen Sinophone culture
to either vanish or thrive.5 In Southeast Asia,
despite a history of settler colonialism, Chinese
Southeast Asians have been increasingly
minoritized since the region’s independence
from European colonialism. heir political
and cultural power is not commensurate with
their economic power (accumulated since the
colonial times), and they are, like their counterparts
in the Western world, regularly subjected
to state-sponsored ethnocentrism.
With the (im)migration thesis, Sinophone
studies belongs to the category of ethnic minority
studies or linguistic minority studies
across the world, announcing the possibility
of what can be called comparative minority
studies either in one nation or across nations.
What insights emerge when we compare Sinophone
American and hispanophone American
literature or when we compare Sinophone
American with Sinophone French or Sinophone
German literature? his comparative
ethnic studies perspective focalizes for us the
divergent or convergent processes of racialization
and minoritization across ethnicities and
places, and it foregrounds the horizontal axes
of minority-to-minority relationality rather
than the Manichaeanism of the majority-tominority
binary (Lionnet and Shih).
The resonances between Sinophone
studies and ethnic studies help emphasize
the nondiasporic, local nature of Sinophone
culture in a given nation-state as an integral
component of that nation-state’s multiculture
and multilinguality. hey allow us to recognize
that Sinophone American culture is
American culture and that Sinitic languages
spoken in the United States are American
languages. hey also allow us to understand
that Sinophone culture, even in its strongest
expression of nostalgia or longing for a
mythical China or the actual one, is place-
714 The Concept of the Sinophone [ P M L A
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based and is of the place where it is produced.
Nostalgia for China in Sinophone American
culture is nostalgia produced from the experience
of living in the United States and hence
is local, a form of American nostalgia.
Languages of the Sinophone
Sinophone culture is produced variously in
many registers, and the linguistic register often
epitomizes the other implied diferences,
so a rudimentary knowledge of the diversity
of the Sinitic languages is required. In earnest
and necessarily retrospective constructions
of the so-called national languages of most
nations in the twentieth century, a chain of
equivalence is unfortunately established between
nationality and language, when in
fact virtually all nations are multilingual. In
China not only are Tibeto-Burman languages
numerous (almost four hundred, also spoken
across South Asia and Southeast Asia), but
also the Sinitic languages, the presumed other
half of the Sino-Tibetan language family, include
at least eight major language groups and
many subgroups. Language-nationalization
campaigns, which entailed making one language
the standard and all the others dialects,
sought to unify the cacophonous linguistic
ield in modern China. he so-called Chinese
dialects can be considered languages (Mair),
but the potential political fallout from ofending
the Chinese state has prevented linguists
from making this statement or from implying
that there may be no logical reason to yoke
Tibeto-Burman and Sinitic languages together
in one language family. his last statement
is tantamount to advocating political
separatism. But the mutual incomprehensibility
among Sinitic languages is oten greater
than that among Romance or other IndoEuropean
languages, and the familial resemblance
between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman
languages is yet to be proved.
When we say a person speaks good Chinese,
we usually mean that he or she speaks
good Mandarin, but many Sinitic languages
are spoken in China, not to mention the wide
variety of non-Sinitic languages spoken by
ethnic minorities there. If we say that all the
other Sinitic and the non-Sinitic languages
are not Chinese, we agree to a one-to-one
equivalence between language and nationality
and to the extension of this equivalence
to ethnicity. It is not surprising that in China
people use the terms “common language”
( ) and “language of the Han” ( )
interchangeably, naturalizing Han-centrism
with an implied awareness that other languages
and ethnicities exist but will not be
considered standard or normative. his implied
awareness makes the Han-centrism
more blatant. If “Chinese” should be a designation
of nationality, not language or ethnicity,
then we can say that all languages spoken
in China are Chinese languages and that any
standardization is a hegemonic process.
he word “Chinese,” then, has been misused
to equate language with nationality and
ethnicity, and official monolingualism has
disregarded and suppressed linguistic heterogeneity.
he concept of the Sinophone, in
contrast, evinces multilinguality not only in
sound but also in script. The predominant
Sinitic language of nineteenth-century immigrants
to the United States was Cantonese, and
they called themselves not “Chinese” ( )
but the “Tang people” ( ); they called
their ghetto “Tang people’s street” ( ),
not Chinatown. They became “Chinese” or
“Chinamen” only by racialized assignation,
which also homogenized other kinds of people
from China and their languages. When the
racial state designated these early immigrants
as speaking Chinese, it did not realize that it
was referring to Cantonese, not Mandarin.
Sinophone American literature, such as the
forty-six-syllable songs ( ) from
early-twentieth-century San Francisco, was
sounded and written in Cantonese. Sinophone
Hong Kong literature has negotiated between
Cantonese and Mandarin interspersed with
1 2 6 . 3 ] Shu-mei Shih 715
thechangingprofession
invented Cantonese scripts for a long time;
mainstream Sinophone Taiwan literature is
the site of negotiation between Hoklo and
Mandarin; Sinophone Malaysian writers
and filmmakers bring into play Cantonese,
Hokkien, Teochew, Mandarin, and others in
script and sound.6 Hence, the Sinophone is
not only of multiple sounds (polyphonic) but
also of multiple orthographies (polyscriptic).
Furthermore, the concept of the Sinophone
registers not only the multiplicity of Sinitic
languages but also how they undergo localization
and creolization in relation to non-Sinitic
languages in a given locality. Sinophone Hui
writers oten use or evoke Arabic, even though
the Hui are considered the most assimilated
Muslim minority in China. In Sinophone
Malaysian literature, writers mix Sinitic languages
with Malay, English, and sometimes
even Tamil. Similarly, Sinophone American
literature, a literary tradition in existence for
more than one hundred years, always has as its
implicit or explicit interlocutor the language
of the majority: English.
Monolingualism of the national language
shares with nationalism the three paradoxes
that Benedict Anderson has attributed to
the latter: it is supposed to be modern, but
it retroactively creates a genealogy of antiquity
to justify itself and is thus atavistic; it
is supposed to be universal, but its concrete
manifestations are particular; it has political
power but is poor and incoherent as a philosophy
(5). Monolingualism of the national
language is, in short, deterministic, atavistic,
and philosophically weak, foreclosing present
and future potentialities. In contrast,
linguistic communities are open and changing
communities where memberships luctuate,
languages mutate or even disappear, and
dynamics among languages and their usages
constantly transform each language. I appreciate
Étienne Balibar’s point on the “strange
plasticity” of the linguistic community as a
“community in the present,” which produces
“the feeling that it has always existed, but lays
down no destiny for the successive generations”
(98–99). A linguistic present and future
without destiny are where the languages of
the Sinophone lie.
Conclusion: What Is Sinophone Literature?
he Sinophone encompasses Sinitic-language
communities and their expressions (cultural,
political, social, etc.) on the margins of nations
and nationalness in the internal colonies
and other minority communities in China as
well as outside it, with the exception of settler
colonies where the Sinophone is the dominant
vis-à-vis their indigenous populations.
I move, inally, from the denotative to the
connotative implications of the concept by
asking the question, what is Sinophone literature?
in a conscious echo of the title of JeanPaul
Sartre’s 1948 essay “What Is Literature?”
If we bracket, for the moment, the necessary
critique of the presumption of universality
that underlies Sartre’s big question, explored
through examples mostly from French literature,
with limited references to American
literature, his question is worth asking again
today, when diaspora has become a prevalent
value and the question of literature as situated
practice is more and more urgent. Sartre
proposes a “situated” literature where writing
is an “act” occurring in a speciic historical
moment as against abstract literature that,
alienated from its age, aims instead for eternal
glory; hence, to write is to write for one’s
age, a “inite time” with a speciic “duration”
(133–36). Sartre ironically calls the quest for
eternity in literature “a last remnant of Christian
belief in immortality” (239) and instead
emphasizes the importance of literature as
situated action, which aims for “concrete universality”
rather than “abstract universality”:
he term “concrete universality” must be understood
. . . as the sum total of men living
in a given society. If the writer’s public could
ever be extended to the point of embracing
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this total, the result would not be that he
would necessarily have to limit the reverberations
of his work to the present time,
but rather he would oppose to the abstract
eternity of glory, which is an impossible and
hollow dream of the absolute, a concrete and
inite duration which he would determine by
the very choice of his subjects, and which, far
from uprooting him from history, would deine
his situation in social time. (136)
Being rooted in history, situated in one’s “social
time,” with a “inite duration,” and addressing
the public in that finite time in a
given society are fundamental to striving for
the concrete universal.
Taking Sartre seriously, I view Sinophone
literature as a situated literature in a given
time and place but would emphasize what is
missing in Sartre’s universalistic paradigm:
geopolitical situatedness, a place-based practice.
Each Sinophone work articulates its
chronotope into being, a speciic time-place
conjunction that is the context of the public it
addresses. In this model, writers of Sinophone
literature exhibit “commitment to the place
where one resides” and “situate themselves
historically,” as Sau-ling Wong once wrote in
discussing Asian American literature (“Denationalization”
19–20). Commitment and
situatedness constitute the “worldliness” of
Sinophone literature in the Saidian sense,
where worldliness is not ever-expanding rootlessness
or pathological narcissism or a simple
synonym for the global. Instead, they make
possible the Sartrean “ethics and art of the
inite” (245). In this way, the Sinophone can
be considered a way of looking at the world,
a theory, perhaps even an epistemology. he
Sinophone as method and theory is derived
from the situatedness of its history and practice
in time and place. It announces the expiration
date of diaspora wherever diaspora is
taken as value; it eschews monolingualism,
ethnocentrism, and colonialism; it evinces the
existential openness and porousness of linguistic
communities; and it aims for the concrete
universal. he Sinophone’s resistance to
the hegemonic call of Chineseness does not
simply demand that we recalibrate postcolonial
theory in our era of empires, it also compels
us to reconceptualize the ields, objects,
and methods of our scholarly inquiries.
NOTES
1. Present-day China is increasingly seen as a new
empire in the United States. Every new Chinese exploit
is related in detail in newspapers and other media, oten
with alarm. he title of a 2010 documentary, China: he
Rebirth of an Empire, captures this widely shared perception.
China bashing aside, China has deinitely become a
superpower, if not an empire. See also Rey Chow on China
as empire vis-à-vis Hong Kong in Ethics ater Idealism and
my work on China as empire vis-à-vis Taiwan (Visuality).
2. For contemporary critiques of Chineseness, see
Ang; Chow, “On Chineseness”; and Chun.
3. David Der-wei Wang, Kim Tong Tee, and many
others have also used the term to foreground Sinophone
culture and literature outside China (Tsu and Wang).
4. For a succinct overview of new Qing history, see Joanna
Waley-Cohen’s review essay. Also see Peter Perdue’s
comprehensive book.
5. On the vanishing of the Sinophone, see the introduction
and conclusion to my book, Visuality and Identity:
Sinophone Articulations across the Paciic (1–39, 183–92).
6. Jing Tsu’s recent book ofers many examples of the
sound and script variations of the Sinophone.
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