Update: adds new email address for editor
Sinographies: Writing China
Every text bears the traces of ethnocentrism; translations always need
reexamining; travelers’ reports are notoriously exaggerated.
None of these observations is in dispute here, although this book works
differently with the problems they point to. The contributors to this volume
discuss (among other things) ethnocentrism, the distortion wrought by
translations, the exoticism that is the travel writer’s stock in trade; but
we do not presume to correct the misperceptions by asserting that our own
perceptions are authentic. (Indeed the question of authenticity—and the
claims we and others might make for it—will be one of the major subjects of
the book.) Rather we explore the particular forms of writing that produce
and convey the meanings of China (within China as well as without it); we
try to understand those writings analytically, symptomatically, and
historically.
Thus we offer neither an analysis (outraged or indulgent) of “Western
images” of China, nor a restoration of Eastern identity. For us, it is not
a novelty to remark that China is “invented” (by the West, by itself, by
modernity, by postmodernity…); it does not satisfy us to discover, at the
end of a long day, that once again someone else has gotten it wrong.
Sinographies (and the discipline, “sinography,” should there come to be such
a thing) acknowledges that China is written. It attends, however, not to the
end result but to the writing process, and to the ways in which that process
(style, trope, plot, figure, vocabulary, pidgin, example) does not simply
reflect thought, but is thought itself. China is not something we think
about, but something we think through; it is a provocation; it realizes
itself variously as subject, process, and end of articulate thinking.
Although our attention never strays far from the “narrative present” of the
textual construction of the many Chinas we examine, we do not forget their
relation of dependency on that other great signifying chain: the specific
history of China, a history more or less coextensive with that of
civilization on the Eurasian landmass. That we are not conducting
referential arguments does not mean that we have chosen to ignore reference.
Indeed, the intricacies of the relationship between various written
Chinas—the texts—and the nation/culture known simply as “China”—their
context—are so complex as to be nearly unspeakable. These essays are
attempts to work out a “bilingual” form of scholarship—one that can engage
its “sources” as “targets,” and vice versa—that might give those intricacies
a voice.
A project as ambitious as this one cannot take China as simply a marginal
example of larger trends in humanistic research (a “field” to which
“theories” can be “applied”). Instead, Sinographies treats China as central
to, as even (re)defining of, many of the crucial problems of contemporary
thought: problems of translation, of subalternity, of the universal human,
of the value of writing. That is, the essays in this collection see those
problems as constituted, multiply or partially, by the sinographies they
read, and available for reformulation by attentive, questioning, broadly
contextual analysis.
§ § §
The foregoing is the preface to an as yet unwritten book. That book, we
hope, will displace some of the boundary-stones marking the present
locations of Chinese studies, Asian studies, literary studies, literary
theory, the critique of Orientalism, cross-cultural investigation, gender
studies, and diasporic research. May we include you as a member of the
project? The preface/proposal above should be followed by short sketches of
the essays that will appear. If you’re interested, please send us a title
and abstract appropriate to that purpose, along with (of course) your
thoughts on the general project. Once we've put together the outlines of the
entire book, we plan to solicit interest among top publishers in the Asian
studies and comparative literature fields. So the sooner we have your
participation, title and abstract, the better. We would be honored to have
you amongst us, and look forward to hearing back from you in the near
future.
Eric Hayot (ehayot@u.arizona.edu)
Haun Saussy (saussy@stanford.edu)
Steve Yao (yao.27@osu.edu)
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