The Cultural Hybridity of Chineseness

This article looks at three contemporary novels where songs sung by rural women from the border region of northern Shaanxi Province evoke cultural and temporal hybridities, fusing social continuity with the threat and promise of change. The novels alternately portray untamed others—ranging from a Xiongnu soldier to a mountain bride to a country girl—as invasive threats and purveyors of potentially beneficial hybridities, adapting tropes of ethnic alterity to rethink the rural-urban divide and challenge both urban-centered and rural-centered discourses of progress. The wild brings vibrancy to the civilized, the center is drawn to the periphery, and the rural and urban are alternately desired and dismissed. In the end, these rural women's songs erase hierarchical notions of center and periphery and bring together alternative worldviews and visions of progress as only songs of the borderland can.

Unsavory Characters

From early works such as “Ralo” (1997) to the more recent “Black Fox Valley” (2012), the acclaimed Tibetan author Tsering Döndrup has demonstrated a consistent interest in the impact of the Chinese language on Tibetan life. This article examines the techniques and implications of Tsering Döndrup's use of Chinese in his Tibetan language texts, focusing on his recent novella “Baba Baoma” (2019), the first-person account of a rural Tibetan boy who attends a Chinese school and ends up stuck between two languages. In a major departure from Tsering Döndrup's previous work on the language problem, this text directly incorporates untranslated Chinese characters, blending them with Tibetan transliterations and Hanyu Pinyin (i.e., the Latin alphabet) to create a deliberately disorienting linguistic collage. This article argues that this latest work pushes Tsering Döndrup's previous experiments to their logical conclusion: a condition of forced bilingualism, in which the author demands of his readers fluency in Chinese in order to access his Tibetan language fiction. This critique of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic crisis puts the author's work into conversation with global postcolonial literatures and the politics of resistance to language hegemony. By demonstrating the Tibetan language's capacity for literary creation, the story effectively resists the hegemony it depicts, even while it suggests that the Tibetan literary text itself is in the process of being fundamentally redefined by its unequal encounter with the Chinese language.

Shen Congwen's Idealized Ethnic

This article investigates the underexamined ethnic motifs of the modern literary master Shen Congwen's 沈從文 fictional creations. In the field of Chinese literary scholarship, Shen is widely recognized as a leading figure of the May Fourth “native soil” literary tradition and is usually labeled as a “regionalist” writer. Yet as an ethnically hybrid author, Shen's ethnographically inspired, mythologizing accounts of indigenous non-Han tribes place him in a long tradition of searching for moral truths in borderland societies in Chinese literary and cultural history. The article argues that ethnicity is an important motif that runs throughout the early Shen Congwen's literary oeuvre, particularly in the Miao-themed stories that he crafted in the 1920s and 1930s. Shen idealizes non-Han peoples, particularly the Miao in southern China's borderland, as the ultimate source of moral courage and aesthetic perfection in his vision of a wholesome China. Through his ethnically themed novellas and short stories, Shen is both heir to and questions the Confucian tradition of locating a civilizational “other” in the non-Sinitic/non-Han border regions. The article further reveals how Shen embodies contradictory motifs with regard to ethnicity in China: on the one hand, he romanticizes the Miao as moral agents living freely in a timeless society, governed only by divine powers and unruly passions. On the other hand, Shen laments the historical discrimination experienced by the Miao and assumes a sober voice as he calls for ethnic equality. Simultaneously lyrical and political, Shen's ethnically themed works are significant for forming new scholarly understandings of both May Fourth literature and the broader discourse of ethnicity, which underpins the very notion of Chineseness in modern China.

The Cultural Creation of the Ethnic Korean Minority in China

Korean-Chinese literature after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) predominantly eulogized the lives of farmers. Such literature portrayed farmers' lives and how, through their work, they could transform both their own livelihoods and that of the nation, this time not in the name of imperialism, but communism. Although such stories reflect themes that one finds in Chinese literature from that period, stories written by Korean-Chinese authors are distinct because they do not shy away from depicting their shared historical experiences under Japanese colonial rule in Manchukuo. Moreover, this colonial experience was in fact highlighted to make it play an important role in the creation and fortification of a Korean-Chinese identity. The Korean-Chinese stories from this period focus exclusively on the local to conjure an image of community. Local problems, however, were often construed as colonial remnants from the Japanese rule in Manchukuo and, in turn, stressed the perceived existence of class differences inside Korean-Chinese communities. While their literature was an attempt to expunge such traits and unify the Korean-Chinese community, they inadvertently created new narratives that exacerbated existing tensions and divisiveness instead.

The Making and Unmaking of Nationalist Literature from the National Margin

This article reconsiders the established modern Chinese writer Duanmu Hongliang and his first and most influential work, The Korchin Banner Plains (completed in 1933 and published in 1939), from a borderland perspective. The novel is set in western Manchuria, a multiethnic area of northeastern China that borders Inner Mongolia and was occupied by Japan in the early 1930s. The novel has been read by many as a realistic portrait of the natural and social landscape of the grassland and as an autobiographical account of the author's family history. This article disagrees, and treats the novel as a performative form of “territory-making” that purposefully recreates a Han-centered modern nation from its geographical margin by carefully reorganizing a web of intricate and competing multiethnic and multinational relations in the grassland. In particular, as a self-identified Manchu, Duanmu makes unconventional choices of both themes and literary styles to imply a calculated embrace of a modern nation by an ethnic other. Through a close examination of the spatial-textual negotiations in the novel, the article delineates how a classic work of nationalist literature was produced from the borderland and how this work exposes the precariousness and contradictions inherent in the grand narrative of modern nationhood.

Sinophonic Detours in Colonial Burma

Following his 1925–1931 overland trek across southwestern China to colonial Burma, Ai Wu's 1935 Travels in the South (the author's canonical collection of autobiographical travelogue fiction) represents a Sinophonic detouring of the key literary impulses of the author's May Fourth forebears and his left-wing literary contemporaries, especially with its social realist expressions of gendered frontier primitivism, interethnic romantic desire, and international leftist solidarity. Ai Wu's southbound transborder itinerary and “street education”—marked by a repetition of trespasses and evictions—develop a “counterpoetics of trespass” blurring boundaries between social realist fiction and autobiographical travelogue while intertextually rerouting romantic primitivism in depictions of indigenous women through counterpoetically anemic prose. Initially taking his cue from Lu Xun, Ai Wu similarly inscribes his literary mission as one of national redemption but in a way that conforms to the leftist internationalist ideals of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which Ai Wu joined after he was forcibly repatriated to China by British colonial authorities in 1931. Ai Wu's Sinophone transborder counterpoetics activate latent self-reflections on the narrator's own male Han-centric exoticism toward indigenous Shan and Burman women and on his unfulfilled desire to forge meaningful relationships with them. Rather than assimilating or subordinating his depictions of these women into a projection of a Chinese leftist national cause, Ai Wu ultimately sublimates his romantic desires into an allegory for Burma's anticolonial resistance movement.

Embracing the Xenophone

By interrogating the borderlands of the discipline of Chinese literature, this article argues that Chinese literary studies should recognize non-Sinitic-language literatures that engage with issues of Chineseness as proper objects of study. Prevailing frameworks in Chinese and Sinophone literary studies range from an implicit aversion to non-Sinitic-language texts to their explicit exclusion. The consequence, however, is that texts that would otherwise be considered works of Chinese literature based on their content and/or combinations of other factors are condemned to a “literary no-man's land.” By removing the minimum threshold of language for consideration in the Chinese literary tradition and permitting texts that otherwise reflect or participate in the production of discourses of Chineseness—which the author theorizes as an embrace of the xenophone—the study of Chinese literature recuperates previously excluded expressions of Chineseness and begins writing a new branch of Chinese literary history. As case in point, the author analyzes the Spanish-language Chinese literature of Chinese Peruvian American writer Siu Kam Wen, specifically, his first collection of short stories, El tramo final (The Final Stretch). From offering new ideas of what it means to be Chinese to rewriting the history of China's red legacies, Siu's work represents a needed intervention in Chinese literary studies that would otherwise be excluded owing to its language of composition.

Unfinished Revolutions

This article examines Wei Beihua's modernist works, which have receded into the shadows of Sinophone Malayan (Mahua) literary history, in relation to Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar, to excavate a neglected route of transculturation at the height of Southeast Asia's nationalist movements during the 1950s. Unlike Anwar's modernist poems that thrive in Indonesia, Wei Beihua's works were considered outliers during a period when realist literature was deemed an effective tool for social mobilization in postwar Malaya. Nonetheless, it is critical for us to recognize that Wei Beihua did not reject realism or underestimate the role of literature in nation building. This article argues that Wei Beihua's idea of modernism is premised on an artist's affective and self-reflexive engagement with realism, which gives rise to a dialectical tension. The tension between his advocacy of an artist's individualism, which is inspired by Anwar, and the impetus of responding to nationalism manifests in his meta-fictional short stories that reflect on the varying motivations behind art creation. His works offer a productive perspective to reconsider the modernist artist's role during revolution and “the limits of realism” of revolutionary works when art was deemed integral to nation building in postwar Southeast Asia.

Conciliatory Amalgamation

Published in 2015, Padi Guli's A Hundred Years of Bloodline tells the story of Fatima, a Uyghur woman's journey to unpack her family history while struggling to understand the status of ethnic minorities in the larger fabric of multiethnic China. The novel concludes with a positive message calling for ethnic integration. This adoption of a state-sanctioned concept of ethnic integration is what this article calls conciliatory amalgamation; it privileges a rhetoric of multiethnicism that centers on national unity and economic progress. This article reads the novel against the PRC's ethnic minority policy to examine the implications of the protagonist's cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical border-crossing as she comes to terms with ethnic amalgamation as a necessary mode of survival. This allows the novel to be read as a symptom of Padi Guli's status as a Sinophone Uyghur writer who establishes herself within the dominant tradition of Chinese literature. As one of the few prominent Sinophone Uyghur writers, she inevitably becomes a token that sustains the rhetoric of Chinese literature as inclusive and diverse. Along this line of thought, the article argues that Padi Guli's status as a writer mirrors that of her protagonist as they both adopt a conciliatory attitude toward amalgamation.