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Sinophone studies—the study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world—has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the past decade. Today, it spans not only literary studies and cinema studies but also history, anthropology, musicology, linguistics, art history, and dance. More and more, it is in conversation with fields such as postcolonial studies, settler-colonial studies, migration studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and area studies.
This reader presents the latest and most cutting-edge work in Sinophone studies, bringing together both senior and emerging scholars to highlight the interdisciplinary reach and significance of this vital field. It argues that Sinophone studies has developed a distinctive conceptualization of power at the convergence of different intellectual traditions, offering new approaches to questions of plurality, hierarchy, oppression, and resistance. In so doing, this book shows, Sinophone studies has provided valuable conceptual tools for the study of minoritized and racialized communities in diverse global settings. Essays also consider how the rise of China has affected Sinophone communities and the idea of Chineseness around the world, among other timely topics. Showcasing cross-fertilization and diversification that traverse and transcend conventional scholarly boundaries, Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines gives readers an unparalleled survey of the past, present, and future of this inherently interdisciplinary field.
— Takashi Fujitani, University of Toronto
Showcasing users of Sinitic languages beyond the hegemony of language nationalism, this book traces local and historically changing meanings through a variety of intersecting registers—literary, sonic, performative, sexual, and, not least, political. Attention to Sinophone experiences at the margins of powerful nation-states, it shows, provides a paradigm-shifting conception of what it is to be and exceed being Chinese.
— Prasenjit Duara, Duke University
When I first encountered Sinophone studies in Shu-mei Shih's writings, it struck me like a bolt from the blue. It challenged the accepted categories, monolithic framings, exceptionalist assumptions, and totalizing injunctions of conventional China studies. This volume reveals in full the power and promise of its disruptive intervention, now a mature methodology animating the work of scholars across multiple disciplines.
— James A. Millward, Georgetown University
Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines is a crucial contribution to the discussion around Sinophone studies as it continues to evolve by dialoguing and intersecting with a variety of fields, disciplines, and theoretical approaches. The volume’s interdisciplinary force, political thrust, and future-orientedness dare us to think smarter and in more ethical ways.
— Andrea Bachner, Cornell University
Alongside the diversity of this volume, the opportunities it points to for future research emphasize Chiang and Shih’s opening argument that Sinophone studies remains a compelling place to stand and look back at power.
Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines presents a timely and incisive intervention into contemporary debates on Chineseness, empire, and geopolitics.
Howard Chiang is the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies, professor of East Asian languages and cultural studies, and director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia, 2021). Between 2019 and 2022, he served as the founding chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.
Shu-mei Shih is the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities and professor of Asian languages and cultures, comparative literature, and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (2007), which has been credited as having inaugurated the field of Sinophone studies, and coeditor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia, 2013).
Introduction: Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines, by Howard Chiang and Shu-mei Shih
Part I: Interdisciplinary Conjunctions
1. The Question of Chinese Empire, by Shu-mei Shih
2. Stonewall Aside: When Queer Theory Meets Sinophone Studies, by Howard Chiang
3. Written Out: Dance and the Sinophone, by Emily Wilcox
4. Cantonese Opera and Sino-Soundscape in North America, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao
5. Ann Hui, Hainan, and the Sino-Vietnamese War: A Sinophone Inter-Asian Recasting of Boat People’s Transpacific Refugee Critique, by Brian Bernards
6. Sinophone Affects: Kyle Dargan’s Anagnorisis and the Poetics of Infrastructure in Chan Tze Woon’s Yellowing, by Lily Wong
Part II: Theories, Methodologies, Controversies
7. Geocritical Sinophone and Transgressive Community, by Yinde Zhang
8. Sinophone Postloyalism, by David Der-wei Wang
9. Parasite: Conceptualizing a Sinophone Approach and Ethics, by E. K. Tan
10. Queer Hong Kong as a Sinophone Method, by Alvin K. Wong
11. Enjoy Your Sinophone!, by Chien-heng Wu
12. The Lure of Diaspora and Sinophone Malaysian Literature in Taiwan, by Wai-Siam Hee
13. Conditions of Theory in Taiwan: Americanism and Settler Colonialism, by Shu-mei Shih
Part III: Places of Differentiation
14. Chinese Settler Colonialism: Empire and Life in the Tibetan Borderlands, by Carole McGranahan
15. Beyond Musical, Political, and Linguistic Boundaries: The Influence of the Hong Kong Rock Band Beyond in the PRC in the 1990s and Its Legacy, by Nathanel Amar
16. Translanguaging as a Transcultural Marker in the Italian Sinophone Play Tong Men-g, by Valentina Pedone
17. From Multilingualism to Mandarin: Chinese Singaporeans as a Sinophone Community, 1945–1990, by Jason Lim
18. Adaptation and Identity Building Among the Ethnic Chinese Communities in Vietnam: A View from Ritual Transformation in Popular Religion, by Tho Ngoc Nguyen
19. The Misconstrued Reader: Contemporary Sinophone Literature in Thailand, by Rebecca Ehrenwirth
Contributors
Index