Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (review)

Jing Tsu makes a provocative claim in the conclusion to her newest book: "whatever appeal Sinophone studies now has, it will need to establish stronger dialogical roots in the long history of diaspora and migration in all its disarticulated forms" (234). The revelatory importance of linking China to its diasporic sites of linguistic and literary production reframes the terrain of study from one that positions China as the unified center from which all discussions about Chinese-language literature emerge and return. In this moment of globalization Jing Tsu's Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora asks readers to step back and critically contend with multi-faceted, polynodal presentations of Chinese as language and literature. Her textured and illuminating analyses of native language and writing debates, technological innovations, and the politics implicit in linguistic standardization open up possibilities for engaging with identity and "all its attendant concepts of nativism, nostalgia, nationalism, and 'Chineseness'" (13). Deeply grounded in the intricacies of language and literature, Jing Tsu provides entrée into the complex study of Chinese in a time of global movements of people, languages, cultural products, and knowledge from a theoretical understanding of how phonetics, orthography, literacy, and migration connect and fracture dependent on location. Rather than pitting an undifferentiated monolithic Chinese language against its seemingly lesser diasporic relatives, Jing Tsu deftly exposes the submerged linguistic assumptions that support a literary field; she takes the dyad of "sound and script" as the contentious starting point for her enlightening study.

Since the 1990s cultural critics and feminist theorists have underscored how we must rethink modernist notions of a unified and unquestioned Chinese identity and language. Proposing a literary process she calls "literary governance," Jing Tsu examines the local and global tensions that arise between how one accesses the language and script and the persistent reliance on the concept of a primary linguistic home (2). Her scholarship remains closely tethered to analyses of nationalism to understand the process of literary governance. At the heart of her study is an attentiveness to linguistic nativity. Questions of authentic speaker—"native speaker"—inform discussions of language learning and usage. Jing Tsu provides a new way to conceptualize this struggle: instead of taking linguistic competence as innate to certain speakers, she unmasks the politics in play with regard to linguistic nativity. She explains and demonstrates that "networks of normalization operate both within and outside of monolingual national traditions, motivating writers and readers to observe a common currency of language" (3). She unveils the functioning of these operations over the course of her book, thereby destabilizing reductive concepts about the nation, mother tongue, and the primacy of native speakers to literary production.

The scope of Jing Tsu's research details key historical and socio-political moments impacting Chinese language and literature that attest to the interwoven threads of nationalism and globalization. Whether in the technological advances brokered through a new typewriter or the scholarly and politic endeavors in the mid-20th century to craft a world literature, Chinese language has been invested in nationalism within a global forum. The Chinese-language typewriter is a physical incarnation of this phenomenon. In chapter three Jing Tsu tells a compelling history of the Chinese language typewriter and the man who patented it in the U.S., Lin Yutang. Positioned against a cultural war over the medium of writing, where world literacy was seen as the exclusive purview of alphabetic script, Lin Yutang conceptualized a reclassification system that broke up the traditional inventory of Chinese characters as inherently non-alphabetic and instead treated stroke order as serial manifestations of the ideographic. This innovation, made manifest in the Chinese-language typewriter, demonstrates "how the technologization of writing advanced the aims of a national language into an international arena" (78), but only through engagement with other worldly sites of technological production.

When we consider languages and literatures as "going global" a certain postmodern freewheeling tendency can creep into the realm of translation theory. Jing Tsu turns away from any easy pomo liberation that abrogates the...