XIZANG XIN XIAOSHUO: CAN CHINESE LITERATURE BE TIBETAN?

The Sinophone “new fiction from Tibet” (Ch. Xizang xin xiaoshuo) emerged during the 1980s as a hybrid cultural product encompassing writers of different ethnic background and their works, which absorbed and appropriated various influences, traditional and modern, Tibetan, Chinese, Western and other. As such, this kind of literature resonates with literatures that emerged from the (post)colonial conditions of many Asian, African and American countries during the twentieth century, not only by using similar strategies of representation of the Other (native or colonial), but also by imitating certain narrative strategies that evolved from the Western modernism. The notion of “literature from Tibet” (Xizang wenxue) appears to be a problematic one, as it is defined geographically, by the place of origin, not by literary, ethnic, or cultural factors. Thus, in itself, it pre-supposes a common condition of the authors and a kind of common identity hidden behind the texts, based upon the geographical location. In the broadest sense, the authors share a similar experience of living in Tibet and approaching it through the prism of the dominant (Chinese) culture and ideology. The aim of this article is to show that despite this fact, two different perspectives can be distinguished in the “literature from Tibet”, bespeaking the inclination of particular authors either to Chinese (dominant) or to Tibetan (minor) identity.