List members may be interested in my review essay, “The Translational Turn and the Dual Pressures on Chinese Literary Studies,” recently published by the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and available via open access.
Here’s the abstract:
Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a “translational turn” in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books—Carla Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy’s The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang’s Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter (2018)—risk taking for granted the longevity of China’s participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.
And here’s the first paragraph:
“These foreign forces you are talking about—are they Marx and Engels?” 你说的境外势力是马克思和恩格斯吗? The comment comes from a student leader in a viral video from the late 2022 protests against the zero-Covid policies of the People’s Republic of China, where people had been kept under intermittent lockdowns for 3 years and which was lately responsible for the deaths of at least 10 in an apartment building fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang—because residents were prevented from leaving their homes and fire-fighters were unable to cross barriers from the outside. The protests were tarred with accusations of having been instigated by “foreign forces” 境外势力, in line with recent attempts the Communist Party of China has made under Xi Jinping 习近平 to both stoke nationalism and extol its Marxism, which did not, of course, originate in China. The student’s shouts against the hypocrisies of such contorted logic are an example of the underlying perspective I also find in a handful of recent scholarly books that show the obvious gains but also the potential pitfalls of a global, postcolonial approach to the study of Chinese literature. The books—Carla Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities (2021), Haun Saussy’s The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang’s Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter (2018)—all argue against assertions of the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity, even as they take for granted the longevity of China’s participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, I will try to think through these gains and pitfalls (and how we might avoid them) here.
You can read the review article in full here: https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2024.8
Lucas Klein Lucas.Klein@asu.edu