The recent emergence of the promising yet problematic field of Sinophone studies is a stimulating development in Chinese studies. With this volume, Sinophone studies appears to have ascended from an individual's guerrilla fight against a Chinese “regime of authenticity” to a concerted field-building campaign.Footnote ¹ Besides being a valuable sourcebook introducing fundamental ideas and major intellectuals in this field, this compilation also encourages the search for alternative approaches to cultural production in a dynamic Sinosphere.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one includes six reprints of theoretical texts that frame the essential issues by interrogating such notions as national identity and cultural allegiance. What is curiously missing is Victor Mair's article on Chinese topolects. The two programmatic essays by Shu-mei Shih clarify the field's nature and scope. Shih's postulate has been controversial because of its epistemological confusion leading to some methodological loopholes. Slightly modified, these two pieces still maintain her basic premises, positioning Sinophone studies as a “resistance” discourse in the Marxian vein of postcolonial studies. Here, the Sinophone is defined as “the linguistic community” (p. 37) of Sinitic-language speakers, which derives its identity from a “problematic relation to China” (p. 33) rather than from ethnic considerations. This “non-ethnic” definition is self-conflicting, however, as it draws the identitarian fault line right along the ethnic division between the Han and minorities within mainland China. Such a contradiction is emblematic of a larger issue haunting many postcolonial critics after they have abandoned the tool of class analysis. Similarly, the Sinophone perspective predicated on the problematik of language, a paradigm no less unstable than ethnicity, simply cannot sustain consistent explorations of complex social relations overdetermined by production relations; it creates instead conceptual conflations that equate feudalist sociopolitical formations (the Qing and its dynastic predecessors) with capitalist ones (France and other colonial empires), or eclipse the difference between the exploitive performance of British colonizers and the assumed “colonial practice” (p. 13) of Chinese immigrants (mostly exploited coolies) in the Straits Settlements.

Part two reprints four influential articles on the overseas Chinese, or the Chinese diaspora. These “discrepant perspectives” (p. 125) are included not so much for “contributing” to Sinophone studies as for representing the antithetical theories targeted by some of the essays in part one. The Sinophone critics do not seem to build a convincing case “against diaspora,” because what is challenged here, somewhat belatedly, as an overinvestment in the mythologized homeland is precisely what major theorists of postcolonial diaspora studies have long ago decisively discredited (Gilroy, Clifford, Boyarin) in order to celebrate the diasporic “hybridity” or “flexible citizenship” (Hall, Ong) in the “postnational world” (Appadurai, Tölölyan). Besides, much of Chinese diaspora studies' concern is with ethnic Chinese articulations in non-Sinitic languages, which Sinophone studies by definition excludes. The real issue is the “essentialist” (p. 29) concept of Chineseness that scholars like the four authors featured in part two are said to embrace as an “organizing” principle (p. 38). But the concept of “Sinophone” is equally unsettling. In order to subsume diverse historical formations under its own sweeping umbrella, the Sinophone first has to essentialize China into a faceless Other. Etymologically, the Sino-episteme (Sina, Sinae) is no more emancipatory than the Cina-episteme (Chine, China), for both stem from the same Indo-European imaginary that habitually reduced the Middle Kingdom to a homogeneous simulacrum. What constitutes the true antithesis to Sinophone studies, but is ignored here, are the China/Taiwan-based institutions of huawen wenxue yanjiu (overseas Chinese-language literature studies). Their absence from the debate in this compilation highlights the irony that Sinophone studies, an English formulation committed to opening space for Sinitic voices, is in fact enabled by the aphonia of Sinitic realities perpetuated in the Anglophone-dominated international cultural politics.

Part three contains eighteen essays, covering several areas of Sinophone concerns. In critical practice, Sinophone studies is powerful when it does what it promises, as demonstrated by the four insightful essays on Hong Kong and Tibet. In the Taiwan case, however, Sinophone studies finds no focus in the face of a congenital dilemma: whether to counter the domination of the island's Han colonizers on behalf of the colonized indigenous Austronesians, or to resist the hegemonism of the continental Han on behalf of the Han on the island. The several studies covering Sinophone literature in Southeast Asia are refreshingly informative, but they regrettably shy away from the realistic threat to the Sinophone: the suppression of Sinitic-language education and the barring of Sinophone writings from national literature by native nationalist regimes in certain Southeast Asian countries. Sinophone studies loses its critical edge where the Sinophone-Chinese binarism does not apply. Such a limitation surfaces in the studies of Sinophone literature in the Americas, Europe, and New Zealand. Here, “Sinophone” appears a useful denotative neologism, but one that is unable to shed light on new problems. Consequently, the essays on these regions, although engaging in their own right, turn out to adopt received frameworks only to raise non-Sinophone conditioned issues that have already received meticulous and sophisticated examinations in other fields, such as “transnationality,” “hybridity,” diasporic “doubleness,” “rehoming,” hermeneutic “translational tension,” or racial discrimination against Chinese immigrants. With that in mind, one is tempted to conclude that the Sinophone is caught in an ontological paradox: it exists by distancing itself from China; and yet as China disappears, so does the Sinophone.