In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The challenge of the phrase “China abroad” is as timely as its richness is inexhaustible, and I want to begin my brief remarks by saluting the editors and contributors of this anthology for opening up this enormously suggestive intellectual space. What they have provided here is nothing short of an ongoing agenda for interdisciplinary research. From the debates on diasporic/ cosmopolitan/transnational identities and the practical and theoretical problems of translation across cultures, to the criticism of literature and film, the work of little-known authors in peripheral enclaves, the strictures and politics of Chinese American writing, and the many scenarios of cross-cultural interaction involving populations of Chinese descent in different parts of the world, the wealth of historical, sociological, and ethnographical materials showcased in these pages is eye-opening. Together, the chapters signal the urgency of a new paradigm for the study of Chineseness as, first and foremost, a type of discursive formation, whereby forces of language, economics, migration, cultural tradition, and socialization coalesce to produce and remold ethnically marked subjects. Reflecting on the collective significance of the chapters, I also want to note that the volume’s deceptively simple title contains an additional challenge, one that deserves a more fully fledged discussion. The elegance of the phrase “China abroad” invites us to imagine what would happen should the two words be made part of some larger statements, such as, for instance, the study of China abroad, China as viewed from abroad, whose China abroad?, and so forth, which do not necessarily amend the phrase but rather supplement it. Once supplemented, however, “China abroad” begins to take on a different level of complexity, not so much in the sense of a possible substantiation with Foreword Rey Chow an ever larger number of contents, as in the sense of a coming-to-the-fore of the phrase’s constructedness—that it is, despite its matter-of-fact appearance, a conceptual assemblage. Let me explain. There is, obviously, no end to the meanings that can be connoted by the word “China.” From the teachings of Confucianism and the travels of Marco Polo, to “Chinese learning for fundamental principle, Western learning for practical use,” that nineteenth-century strategy of dealing with westerners as advocated by the politician Zhang Zhidong; the popular Orientalist phenomenon of chinoiserie; the United States’ anxiety over “the loss of China” during the Cold War; the international recognition of “Chinese cinema” in the late twentieth century; the rise of the People’s Republic of China to the status of economic superpower by the turn of the twenty-first century . . . the list goes on. But that is beside the point. Unlike that fantastical Chinese encyclopedia invented by Jorge Luis Borges and cited by Michel Foucault (at the beginning of Les mots et les choses) to dramatize the foreignness posed by “China” to western thinking, the question at hand is not exactly the limits of western classificatory systems, as Foucault imagines, but rather the very excess of China as a referent for any scholar needing to invoke it in a title. For the readers of this volume, such referential excess means that the following questions are worth keeping in mind: Is “China” (to be regarded as) a geopolitical reality, nation, history, tradition, demography, or all of the above? Is “China” an object of study with well-defined characteristics and boundaries, or is it an imaginary, a collective mode of interpellation which may or may not be securely anchored in a particular location? Should “China” always be equated with those who have sovereignty over the Chinese mainland, with people of “Chinese descent,” or with users of the Chinese language? That said, we are not simply dealing with China but specifically with “China abroad.” The editors and authors of this volume have supplemented “China” with the condition of being in foreign lands. This supplement, the occasion for the many discussions about linguistic, existential, and national/ cultural identitarian movements and transgressions, makes the volume a laudable rejoinder to the studies of travel, exile, migration, translation, and transnationalism that, increasingly, are modifying and reshaping scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In many ways, the chapters here bear testimony to a worldwide contemporary academic orientation, whereby the researchers of even a seemingly stable referent such as “China,” however inexhaustible its contents, need to become responsive to influences of larger social happenings such as changing demographics. “Abroad” is, in this respect, the rationale for the staging of a certain kind of...

Share