By Way of China

Sinographies: Writing China begins with a provocative editorial pronouncement: “‘China’ is not something one thinks about but something one thinks through; it is a provocation” (xi). The basic premise is that “China” is textually constructed, and careful examination of the complex processes of such construction yields insights into not just “China” but the nature of thinking and writing as well. The fourteen essays collected in this volume are proof of the fruitfulness of such an approach. While they address the “writing” of “China” from a variety of disciplinary angles, the essays are more than case studies; each contributes to the book’s larger theoretical ambition, namely, to “think through ‘China,’” treating China “as central to, as even (re)defining, many of the crucial problems of contemporary thought: problems of translation, of subaltern subjectivity, of the universal human, of the value of writing” (xii).

In the past two decades, the notion of Chineseness has come under intense scrutiny in the Weld of Chinese studies. A landmark publication was the autumn 1998 special issue of boundary 2, “Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field.” In her introduction to the issue, titled “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” Rey Chow traces the historical construction of Chineseness to both Western imperialism and Chinese nationalism. A symptom of the imperial legacy is the conventional use of “Chinese” as a modifier for “literature,” which allows “an entire theory of ethnicity” to be “embedded (without ever being articulated as such) in the putative claims about Chinese poetics and literary studies” (Chow, 15). But, to complicate the matter, the ethnic essentialism imposed by the West has been obsessively embraced by Chinese intellectuals and deployed by the Chinese state to suppress internal as well as diasporic differences. Given its role in ethnic hegemonies of both Western and Chinese varieties, the political question is whether one can, as Ien Ang puts it, “say no to Chineseness”—conceiving a more radical notion of diaspora that is no longer attached to Chineseness as a decentered center (Ang).

Sinographies should be read in this context as participating in the ongoing project that takes “China” as the problematic. The opening chapter, by Eric Hayot, directly engages Ang’s earlier intervention, but takes it into the new territory of contemporary American science fiction. Insofar as imagining Chinese futures is necessary for dealing with the American present, Chineseness is just as much a problem for the West as it is for people who identify as Chinese. In terms of methodological stance, Sinographies thus refuses to make the distinction “between China the geopolitical nation and ‘China’ the westernized trope, as though one of those ought to be studied as historical and political (sinology) and the other read in literary terms (sinography).” Instead, it acknowledges “the realness of both the referential and the discursive” and focuses “on the manner of their interactions” (Hayot, 19–20).

Sinographies sets out to accomplish two intertwined tasks: to deconstruct China as an orientalist trope, and to decenter China as a geopolitical entity. Deconstruction is the emphasis of the first three sections. The textual practices involved include contemporary America science fiction (Hayot), Cold War testimonial and reportage narratives (Glassmeyer, Kendall), European modernist poetics (Bush, Saussy), Miltonian cosmology (Lim), Jesuit translation (Billings), and, finally, architectural aesthetics (Porter). While the invention of China is not a new notion, seeing it laid out in such a wide variety of contexts, both historically and in terms of the type of textual practice involved, serves as a powerful reminder of just how close China is to the core problems of each era in Euro-American thought and imagination. The point Christopher Bush makes about Ezra Pound holds true generally: inventing China simultaneously means inventing one’s own time and context “as one in part defined by its relations to things Chinese” (Bush, 35). The right question to ask, then, is not what China is, but what it does.

In most cases, China is invented as the necessary “other” through whose mediation the...