Sinophone Studies

A Critical Reader

Author: Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai and Brian Bernards Series: Global Chinese Culture

Sinophone studies defines a new and exciting academic field. Rather than viewing diaspora through a romanticizing lens, the essays reveal the power structure laid down by colonial expansion, overseas settlement, and migration. The book offers important new paradigms for the relationship among nation, state, and language. -- Yomi Braester, author of Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract This landmark volume introduces Sinophone studies as a mode of inquiry. Bursting the boundaries of established 'Chinese literature,' these essays seek to expand the territorial and cultural purchase of a monolingual 'Chinese' language and insist on the Sinophone as a site of heterogeneity, of multiple tongues in ceaseless interaction. -- Brett de Bary, Cornell University The emergence of Sinophone studies within the last decade has been one of the most interesting developments. Most exciting is that nearly all of the very foundations and earliest adumbrations of this novel concept are to be found in Sinophone Studies, which makes it a unique resource for introducing this fresh field to student and scholar alike. -- Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania This pathbreaking anthology maps out a bold and heterogeneous terrain for the field of Sinophone studies. China is one of the oldest extant empires as well as one of the most powerful countries in the world today, yet the term 'Sinophone' is not part of our vocabulary the way 'Anglophone' and 'Francophone' are. This expansive collection will change that. Postcolonial, diaspora, area, immigration, and ethnic studies will never be the same. -- David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania This is an important and timely resource for anyone interested in Sinophone studies, its conceptual genesis in the 1980s, relationship to earlier debates on 'Chineseness,' and current directions. It will appeal to a broad audience in North America, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other major and minor communities at cross-sections of the Chinese-speaking world. -- Jing Tsu, Yale University

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.

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“A valuable sourcebook introducing fundamental ideas and major intellectuals in this field...”

Journal of Asian Studies

About the Author

Shu-mei Shih is professor of comparative literature, Asian languages and cultures, and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the author of, among other works, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. Chien-hsin Tsai is assistant professor of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Of Classics and Men: Lian Heng and the Writing of History and Poetry in Taiwan at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Brian Bernards is assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California, where he specializes in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian literature and cinema and postcolonial studies.