Sinophone and Chinese Minority Literature

Modern Chinese literature involves a plethora of languages that are constantly in tension with each other. Tension exists between classical Chinese, the intellectual written lingua franca used from the third century to the early twentieth century, and vernacular Chinese, which replaced classical Chinese to become the primary written form of the Chinese language today; between a singular, standardized and idealized national language and the numerous dialects that are unintelligible to each other; between this variability in sound and the relative stability in script; between Chinese and non-Chinese languages used by ethnic minorities in the postwar, multi-ethnic, socialist regime of the People’s Republic of China; among different versions of Sinophone languages found in Chinese-speaking communities across the world; and between Chinese and multiple foreign languages that found their way into modern Chinese literature through missionaries, colonizers, and other agents of settlement and dispersion.

The territories and boundaries of these languages are often blurry and are constantly shifting, but they are important venues for understanding the literary longings and sense of belonging of Chinese and Sinophone writers in the modern period. The aim of this project is to delineate these linguistic territories and boundaries of modern Chinese literature and to explore their cultural implications.

​

Publications under this project include an overview article on the issue of language in modern Chinese literature ("Language," forthcoming), a special issue that David Der-wei Wang, Kyle Shernuk and I co-edited (Chinese Literature across the Borderlands, 2021), and a set of research articles on Chinese Ethnic Manchu and Korean writers.