Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines

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.

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).

Andrea Bachner, Cornell University:
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.

James A. Millward, Georgetown 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.

Prasenjit Duara, Duke University:
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.

Takashi Fujitani, University of Toronto:
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.