Heteroglossia#3: The concept of “yellow” as “Sinophone trouble”

Longlati Public Program | Heteroglossia

 

In response to the shift of forefront of thoughts and resonate with the pulse of the times, the Longlati Collection and Patronage Program was initiated in 2017 with three themes: 20th-century international women artists, minority and multi-minority cultures, and the practice of post-90s Chinese artists. These threads fall within three emerging academic fields: feminist philosophy, minority theory, and Sinophone studies. However, these fields, closely related to “otherness,” have not yet been intensely cultivated and connected in the Sinophone circle. Motivated by this condition, “Heteroglossia” seeks to answer questions such as: What is the significance of producing feminist exhibitions in the Sinophone world? Why must we pay particular attention to minority groups and their theories? Are Chinese a minority? In the wake of identity politics, how do we find discourses that link each other amid the clamor of the multitudes? In particular, how can the voices of the many proclaim “Hua”?

 

Co-curators: Jenny Jiaying Chen, Mingzhe Chen, Daihai Zhang

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1.3 The concept of “yellow” as “Sinophone trouble”

 

The bankrupt field of racial science had its origin in the Age of Enlightenment and was a product of European industrialization and colonial expansion. It was invested in inventing various bio-physical frameworks to classify human beings into different racial groups and reached its peak with the prevalence of European and American imperialism in the nineteenth century. However, why is it that in the twenty-first century, when this pseudoscience has long been obsolete, one of its most important inventions, the concept of the “yellow” race, is still circulating widely in the Chinese-speaking world? Why, in contrast to “black”, “yellow” as a racial marker is not as commonly used in the relevant political demands and cultural discussions? This workshop will focus on the entanglements between “yellow” and Chineseness from two different perspectives, namely Western cultural history and contemporary Sinophone Studies, and discuss how Sinophone imagination, represented by millennial pop culture from Hong Kong and Taiwan, has perpetuated and reshaped this imported racial idea. The speaker will propose the theoretical concept of “Sinophone trouble” to critique both the paradigm of area studies as it has been established in Euro-American academy since the Cold War and the inherent inconsistencies of Sinophone as theory, which has been hotly debated in recent years.

 

Period: July 16, 2023 14:00-16:00

Venue: Longlati Garden Exhibition Area

Readings

• 史书美（2013），《视觉与认同：跨太平洋华语语系表述》，台北：联经
• 史书美（2017），《反离散：华语语系研究论》，台北：联经
• 许维贤（2018），《重绘华语语系版图：冷战前后新马华语电影的文化生产》，香港：香港大学出版社
• 王德威（2007），《后遗民写作：时间与记忆的政治学》，台北：麦田
• Shi, Flair Donglai. ‘Reconsidering Sinophone Studies: The Chinese Cold War, Multiple Sinocentrisms, and Theoretical Generalisation’, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, Vol. 4, no. 2 (2021): 311-344.

 

Guests

 

SHI Donglai is a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oxford, the Tenure-track Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the part-time Master’s Supervisor in the Translation and Cultures program at the University of Warwick. He has compiled World Literature in Motion. His research focuses on world literature theory, postcolonial studies, Sinophone studies, and Sino-African Cultural Exchange. His academic papers have been published in AHCI journals such as Critical Comparative Studies, Translation & Literature, Comparative Literature Studies. He has also contributed to media in both Chinese and English, including Sixth Tone and Wenxuebao. He is currently preparing his first English monograph Yellow Peril Revisited and exploring issues of racial politics in contemporary Sino-African productions. At Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he leads the operation of the lecture series “Transnational and Situated” (you can follow the WeChat public account is zaidikuawenhua).

 

 

ZHANG Dahai (Gui Jue Zi, b.1995, born in Xi’an in 1995) lives and works in Guangzhou. He graduated in Cultural Studies from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium with a master’s degree, and received his bachelor’s degree from Simon Fraser University in Canada, with majors in Philosophy and Linguistics. He is about to pursue further studies in Curatorship at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His main research interests include contemporary Left-Wing aesthetics, Sinophone studies, postcolonial theory, and East Asian studies. He has been engaged in the research, translation, and promotion of contemporary critical theory, and serves as the anchor of “State of Exception,” the editor-in-chief of “Representation and Simulacrum,” and the founder of “Exceptional Spaces.” He has translated Judith Butler’s Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (forthcoming) and Jacques Rancière’s The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction (in progress).

 

Musquiqui Chihying is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. He explores the cultural and social identities constructed through the flow and circulation of audiovisual elements in physical and virtual spacetime. Specialising in the use of multimedia such as film and sound, he investigates the human condition and environmental system in the age of global capitalisation and engages in the inquiry of and research on issues of subjectivity in contemporary social culture in the Global South. His works have been shown in several international institutions and film festivals, such as “72nd Berlinale” (2022), Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2021), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2020), “International Film Festival” Rotterdam (2020), “2016 Taipei Biennial”, “10th Shanghai Biennale” (2014) etc. He is shortlisted for the 2019 Berlin Art Prize and the winner of the Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Award 2019 from Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró. He is a member of the Taiwanese art group Fuxinghen Studio, and the founder of the Research Lab of Image and Sound.