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1. Folding Chinese Boxes: Sensing the Chinese Exotic
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Folding Chinese Boxes 27 This chapter explores how the Chinese exotic ‘makes sense’ by following a form that ‘folds’ — both in terms of the way it negotiates competing discourses and formations, and also in the way it permits certain images and representations of diasporic Chinese femininity to circulate and become globally visible. The Chinese exotic manifests itself as both ‘inside’ (chic, fashionable), as well as ‘outside’ (different, strange). The Chinese exotic also folds between notions of time and space: figured as ‘outside time’ — ahistorical and traditional, yet also a contemporary formation resulting from the newly emergent Asian modernities and economies. The fold, as a trope representing movement, enables negotiations between these competing claims on images of diasporic Chinese femininity. More specifically, the fold follows a movement that constitutes a shift from essence to representation to experience. This shift aims to disrupt fixed representations of Chinese femininity that have materialised a certain essence; by exposing the representational bases to these perceived ‘essences’, it becomes possible to explore how they allow us to be moved, through sensory experience. The fold can suggest an active subjecthood for diasporic Chinese femininity rather than merely a representational objecthood that is fixed. As Margaret Morse alerts us, “sense knowledge represented in intercultural contexts can offer potentially shattering variant forms of perception”.1 The chapter is organised into two main sections: the first sets out the theoretical foundations for the concept of the fold and outlines its operative principles as they relate to the Chinese exotic. The second section 1 Folding Chinese Boxes: Sensing the Chinese Exotic 28 Fold demonstrates how these principles allow the Chinese exotic to become intelligible; that is, to ‘make sense’ in quotidian spaces such as food and fashion cultures. Folding, and ‘Making Sense’ of the Exotic The fold characterising the Chinese exotic is dependent in large part on the characteristics set out in Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. In The Fold, Deleuze utilises Leibniz’s monadic philosophy to exemplify a period he refers to as the Baroque. By ‘the Baroque’, Deleuze is not referring to a precise historical era (usually represented as Europe of the seventeenth century); rather, it is more a style or what he calls an “operative function”, which is characterised by, and which endlessly produces, folds.2 Leibniz’s monadic philosophy conceives of the world as a series of folds: of curvatures and inflections reflected in the monad. Each monad represents one point of view, one way of seeing the world, thus allowing shifts in positionality between these points of view. Deleuze suggests that there are two ways of differentiating the folds in Leibniz’s monadic theory: according to the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul, which he represents through the allegorical figure of the ‘Baroque House’. There are two floors or levels of this house. On the lower floor are windows that open out, representing the five senses. On the top floor are the closed, private rooms or ‘windowless’ monads that are distinct from one another and which each express the world from a singular point of view. It is important to note that the two floors are one and the same world, connected through the fold which is virtual, albeit actualised in the monads and realised in matter. That is, the world consists of a series of folds that separates the floors (the inside and the outside), as it links them up.3 In his attempt to define a paradigm for the Baroque fold, Deleuze speculates as to whether it would be an ‘Oriental fold’ or an ‘Occidental fold’, positing that certain styles can convey and periodise manners of thinking. Deleuze questions, “the search for a model of the fold goes directly through the choice of a material. Would it be the paper fold, as the Orient implies, or the fold of fabric, that seems to dominate the Occident?”4 Deleuze only briefly mentions this ‘Oriental fold’, which may or may not partly constitute the Baroque fold. What is interesting about his comment, however, is that it is exemplary of popular representations of the Chinese exotic in the West, and in particular, of how Chinese femininity is able to travel into the West by being a ‘paper fold’. Paper is thin, delicate and ethereal, whereas fabric is [107.23.85.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:51 GMT) Folding Chinese Boxes 29 stronger; these are gendered tropes within exoticist representations.5 The fold of the Chinese exotic, although drawing...