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This course considers the configuration of space, place, and identity in relation to languages, gender, and social class in Sinophone literature and culture. Engaging the issues of multiculturalism, linguistic plurality, narrative heteroglossia, and transnational im/mobility. This class probes the concept of the Sinophone and how it relates to, complicates, and challenges China and Chineseness. What is the Sinophone? How does it inform our readings of texts produced outside and on the margin of China and Chineseness? In challenging existing centers of power and hegemony, does the Sinophone form new centers? How does migration during different time periods and across different space shape the cultures of these Sinophone sites? Building on recent scholarship on Sinophone studies, this course draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories to examine a culturally and geographically diverse body of contemporary Sinophone fiction and film.

I. THE SINOPHONE, SPACE, PLACE, AND IDENTITY

• Space and Place

II. HONG KONG: DISAPPEARANCE AS CULTURAL POLITICS

• Hong Kong from an Outsider’s View
• Hong Kong as Space and Place I
• Hong Kong as Space and Place II
• Hong Kong as Space and Place III

III. TAIWAN: COLONIAL PAST AND MULTICULTURALISM

• Taiwan as a Colonial Space I
• Taiwan as a Colonial Space II
• Taiwan as a Colonial Space III

IV. SHANGHAI: NOSTALGIA AND LOCAL IDENTITY

• Shanghai Dialect and Local Identity I