書評：The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia. By Haun Saussy

The Making of Barbarians centers on the idea of China and Otherness. In this book, Saussy seeks to engage in dialogue with scholars from both the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. The book opens with a critique of the conceptual model of bijiao wenxue比較文學, which, as Saussy points out, was proposed about a century ago by Chinese intellectuals such as Hu Shi胡適(1891-1962) in pursuit of modernity. The model of bijiao wenxue is Eurocentric as it compares Chinese literature with that of the West, mostly England and France. Though Sinocentrism might“tug against”Eurocentrism, Saussy argues that Sinocentrism itself also needs to be taken down. To achieve that goal, he proposes to look at the Other from the perspective of the“center”with a reconstructed point of view. Therefore, The Making of Barbarians investigates“the outside seen from the inside”by examining not only“how many different kinds of wai外there are,”but also“how many ways there are of relating to them”(9).