Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines - (Global Chinese Culture) by Howard Chiang & Shu-Mei Shih

About the Book

This reader presents the latest and most cutting-edge work in Sinophone studies, bringing together both senior and emerging scholars to highlight the interdisciplinary reach and significance of this vital field.

Book Synopsis

Sinophone studies--the study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world--has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the past decade. Today, it spans not only literary studies and cinema studies but also history, anthropology, musicology, linguistics, art history, and dance. More and more, it is in conversation with fields such as postcolonial studies, settler-colonial studies, migration studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and area studies.

This reader presents the latest and most cutting-edge work in Sinophone studies, bringing together both senior and emerging scholars to highlight the interdisciplinary reach and significance of this vital field. It argues that Sinophone studies has developed a distinctive conceptualization of power at the convergence of different intellectual traditions, offering new approaches to questions of plurality, hierarchy, oppression, and resistance. In so doing, this book shows, Sinophone studies has provided valuable conceptual tools for the study of minoritized and racialized communities in diverse global settings. Essays also consider how the rise of China has affected Sinophone communities and the idea of Chineseness around the world, among other timely topics. Showcasing cross-fertilization and diversification that traverse and transcend conventional scholarly boundaries, Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines gives readers an unparalleled survey of the past, present, and future of this inherently interdisciplinary field.

Review Quotes

Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines is a crucial contribution to the discussion around Sinophone studies as it continues to evolve by dialoguing and intersecting with a variety of fields, disciplines, and theoretical approaches. The volume's interdisciplinary force, political thrust, and future-orientedness dare us to think smarter and in more ethical ways.--Andrea Bachner, Cornell University

Postdisciplinary, decolonial, antiessentialist, anti-imperialist, antiheteronormative, antinationalist, and committed to theoretical rigor and justice on a world scale, this is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the stakes and contributions of one of the most important challenges in recent decades to dominant ways of knowing about Asia in its global relations.--Takashi Fujitani, University of Toronto

Showcasing users of Sinitic languages beyond the hegemony of language nationalism, this book traces local and historically changing meanings through a variety of intersecting registers--literary, sonic, performative, sexual, and, not least, political. Attention to Sinophone experiences at the margins of powerful nation-states, it shows, provides a paradigm-shifting conception of what it is to be and exceed being Chinese.--Prasenjit Duara, Duke University

When I first encountered Sinophone studies in Shu-mei Shih's writings, it struck me like a bolt from the blue. It challenged the accepted categories, monolithic framings, exceptionalist assumptions, and totalizing injunctions of conventional China studies. This volume reveals in full the power and promise of its disruptive intervention, now a mature methodology animating the work of scholars across multiple disciplines.--James A. Millward, Georgetown University

About the Author

Howard Chiang is the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies, professor of East Asian languages and cultural studies, and director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia, 2021). Between 2019 and 2022, he served as the founding chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.

Shu-mei Shih is the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities and professor of Asian languages and cultures, comparative literature, and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (2007), which has been credited as having inaugurated the field of Sinophone studies, and coeditor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia, 2013).