Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific(2 Asia Pacific Modern)

Shu-mei Shih inaugurates the field of Sinophone studies in this vanguard excursion into sophisticated cultural criticism situated at the intersections of Chinese studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, and transnational studies. Arguing that the visual has become the primary means of mediating identities under global capitalism, Shih examines the production and circulation of images across what she terms the "Sinophone Pacific," which comprises Sinitic-language speaking communities such as the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese America. This groundbreaking work argues that the dispersal of the so-called Chinese peoples across the world needs to be reconceptualized in terms of vibrant or vanishing communities of Sinitic-language cultures rather than of ethnicity and nationality.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments About Romanization Introduction Visuality in Global Capitalism Identity in Global Capitalism Sinophone Articulations 1. Globalization and Minoritization The Limits of a Coup d'Etat in Theory Flexibility and Nodal Points Flexibility and Translatability 2. A Feminist Transnationality Identity Fragment 1: Feminist Antagonism against Chinese Patriarchy Identity Fragment 2: Liberal Antagonism against the Maoist State Identify Fragment 3: Antagonism of a Minority Subject Identity Fragment 4: Antagonism against the Western Gaze 3. The Geopolitics of Desire Beleaguered Communities Sexualizing the "Mainland Sister" Feminizing the "Mainland Cousin" Gender and Public Sphere 4. The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity A Short History of the "Mainland" "Eternal China" in the 1990s The "Intimate Enemy" in the Twenty-First Century Struggles of the Sinophone 5. After National Allegory The Allegorical Time and the City-cum-Nation The Allegorical and the Mundane Refashioning Hongkongness 6. Cosmopolitanism among Empires The Age of Empires and, Especially, Their Sizes Cosmopolitanism, Multiplicity, Danger Untranslatable Ethics Can Cosmopolitanism Be Ethical? Conclusion: The Time and Place of the Simophone Notes Selected Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Shu-mei Shih is Professor in Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (UC Press) and coeditor of Minor Transnationalism.