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Reviewed by:
  • Sinographies: Writing China
  • Josephine Nock-Hee Park (bio)
Sinographies: Writing China, edited by Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Xxi + 381 pp. $27.50 paper. ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4725-5; ISBN-10: 0-8166-4725-9. $82.50 cloth. ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4724-8; ISBN-10: 0-8166-4724-0.

Sinographies: Writing China collates fourteen imaginative and often surprising essays that all stem from a central notion of China as a "provocation"-as the editors write in their introduction (xi)-which both inspires and inhibits writing. The age-old industry of "inventing China" has produced writing from all corners of the globe, and Sinographies presents a major attempt to capture the dizzying range of these writings as they enter into "crucial problems of contemporary thought" (xii). The plural of the title attests to the multiplicity of these discursive forays into disparate Chinas, and each instantiation exerts a particular hold on the imagination and body of the writer in question. What binds these various approaches together, however, is an attention to the process of writing: as the introduction puts it, "Sinographies acknowledges the fact that China is written" (xi). In foregrounding writing, the book as a whole invites us to rethink the problem of referentiality, the thing behind the word. The linguistic turn of French philosophy in the late twentieth century taught us to doubt and delay reference, and Sinographies starts from this premise-not to debunk the referent all over again, but to ask anew how China gets written and what this writing may serve or reveal for fields across the humanities.

The introduction rehearses the organization of the volume-"the language and rhetoric of 'China,' early modern cultural production, testimony/reportage/ meddling, minority discourses and immigration" (xii)-but then goes on to posit an alternate series of rubrics for grouping the essays: "Reference, Fidelity, Transformation," "Translation and Literary Institutions," "The Politics of Imperialism," and "The Politics of Fiction" (xii-xvii). The disjunction between the book's section headings and the subheadings within the introduction suggests a kind of phantom reordering that shadows the progression of the essays. The [End Page 232] introduction's gesture of destabilizing categories suggests writerly duties on the part of the reader as well, who is given license to reshuffle the essays to create yet another set of categories. This suggestion of play with the volume's contents deftly mines a Barthesian precedent-and the introduction cites both Barthes's and Kristeva's contacts with the Far East (viii-ix)-as a means of inaugurating an approach that both comprehends and shifts boundaries of thought and discipline, not to undermine or transcend them but to register their full weight. Writing China has always meant confronting "Great Walls of Discourse," to cite from Haun Saussy's important 2001 study,1 and the potential regroupings sketched in the introduction to Sinographies demonstrate a proliferation of walls that shape the concepts they surround.

In pointedly rejuggling its own organization, the introduction illustrates the editors' claim that "while proposing a mode or manner of approach to a set of texts that refer (biologically, literally, politically, religiously, digitally) to China," the collection "has not policed its theoretical boundaries too cleanly" (xii). The list of adverbs in parentheses provides a glimpse of the multifarious approaches contained in Sinographies, but the core problematic of writing China sustains a thread throughout the collection. Virtually all of the approaches displayed in Sinographies are shot through with affect: the essays are preoccupied with expressions of sympathy and antipathy directed at a China rendered in deeply subjective terms. Eric Hayot's opening essay traces a history of "the anxiety that China can provoke about the West and its future" (19) in readings of science fiction texts, and the essays that follow present a faraway place written over with the fears and desires of its observers and visitors: from Walter S. H. Lim's reading of Milton's admiration for China and David Porter's analysis of William Chambers's eighteenth-century fantasia on Oriental gardening as an artifact of his nostalgia for a past experience in China, to Danielle Glassmeyer's reading...

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