Voices from the Margin: Modern Chinese and Sinophone Writers

(4 Credits)

The literary scene in the modern and contemporary Chinese-speaking world is diverse, vast, and challenging for the migrant and exilic minds whose creative energies are often driven by their poignant insights to the turbulent events around them. Working in, outside, and between places like mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, America, and parts of Southeast Asia, Chinese-language writers ask questions about nationalism, tradition, ethno-linguistic politics, and cultural authenticity. They speak from and across multiple cultural margins to probe the nature of modernity, cross-cultural contact, and otherness amid the global flows of labor and ideas. This course invites students to participate in the ongoing discursive and historiographical debates over the study of “modern Chinese literature” through a fast-emerging transnational and comparative perspective. Reading stories, novels, and essays by both established and marginalized writers, we place the traditional nation-based rubric of Chinese literary studies in critical dialogues with a set of jarring historical contexts: Euro-American imperialism, Chinese emigration and their settler-colonial history, the post-1949 political split, and global decolonization movements, among others. We ask: how do writers represent China on the world stage? Where in their works can we discern stylistic and cultural hybridization? How do they variously cement or deconstruct the conventional East-West divide? What alternative literary geographies and worldviews do they offer? We begin with the satirical modernists of Republican-era China. Next, we turn to Hong Kong and Taiwan for identity debates, colonial legacies, nativism, and postmodern cultures. In light of the global migration history, we also study narratives from Chinese-speaking America, Malaysia, and Singapore to analyze how writers creatively deconstruct the notion of Chineseness. Finally, we discuss the changing terms of exclusion and inclusion of ethnic minorities in present-day Han-Chinese societies, to further expose the internal fractures within the global Sinophone cultures. (This may be used as a topic course or literary interpretation in the Humanities.) Pre-requisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE IPC/HPC; GCS China and the World or Chinese Media, Arts, and Literature; Humanities Introductory course; Chinese Language and Literature Minor.