英文摘要 |
This essay consists four loosely articulated parts. Part I is a parabolic reading of a short story, “Bali laike”(The Visitor from Paris), by a mainland-origin writer now resident in the United States, Wang Ruiyun. I move on in Part II to three concepts- genocentrism, translocationism, and racinationism. In Part III, I link the three concepts to the characters in “The Visitor from Paris,” who may be said to enact various forms and combinations of genocentrism, translocationism, and racinationism. I argue that what appears to be “local vision” may in fact be colored heavily by genocentric concerns. In Part IV, I analyze the notion of “global vision” as seen in certain literary criticism on Sinophone Chinese American literature produced in Chinese or by Chinese-ancestry writers outside China proper. Through my inquiry, I attempt to address some of the key questions raised by editors Jing Tsu and David Wang in Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. Foremost is the one they raise at the beginning of their introduction. Noting the fraught nature of all three words in their focal term, “global Chinese literature,” they ask: “Why global? Why now?” The second key question concerns whether analysis of Chinese literature(s) produced around the world must always presuppose a “center.” From my location of intellectual and institutional affiliation with minority discourses, Sinophone writing produced in the United States offers a rich body of work for pondering the question of “the center” in a grounded manner. |