Organizer: Emma Teng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chair: David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University

Discussant: Frank Dikotter, SOAS, University of London, UK; David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University

For more than two decades, the notion of "Cultural China" has provided a broad discursive category for conceptualizing Chineseness as an identity extending beyond the Chinese nation-state. This conceptual framework, however, has met with new challenges in light of recent work in Diaspora, Interracial, and Queer Studies. Whether we are talking about diasporic Chinese who do not speak Chinese, queer subjects who challenge normative sexualities, or those who engage in interracial relationships, the label "un-Chinese" has often been applied to those who form identities beyond the cultural mainstream. And yet, as the papers on this panel will demonstrate, the concept of "un-Chinese" enables us to reinterrogate the formation of Chinese racial and cultural nationalism. Juxtaposing the perspectives of literature, intellectual and cultural history, and queer studies, this Border-Crossing Panel seeks to interrogate how "Chineseness" -- in its various racial, cultural, national, legal and sexual dimensions -- has been negotiated vis-à-vis various marginalized identities that challenge essentialism in multiple ways. In a comparative spirit, our panel spans the late 19th century through the contemporary period and focuses on geographic locations from China to Southeast Asia and North America. While each panelist will focus on a particular case of cultural hybridization, racial assimilation, or queerness, together the papers pose broad questions about how and why Chineseness has been legislated and recognized. By deliberately probing the "contact zones" between "Chineseness" and "un-Chineseness," we intend to open a dialogue concerning how we understand what it means to be Chinese in an increasingly transnational and hybridized world.

Emma Teng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Is it possible for a Westerner to become Chinese? What are the racial limits of Chineseness? My paper will probe these questions through an examination of writings concerning Chinese-Western intermarriage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Arguing that this is a highly gendered problematic, I specifically analyze the case of Western women who married Chinese men, looking at legal, historical, and literary documents. During the late Qing and early Republican periods, the conventions of international law caused Western women who married Chinese men to lose their own nationalities (marital expatriation) and to assume the nationalities of their husbands. These women then became, in a legal sense at least, "Chinese," and many returned to China with their husbands to raise families. However, there arose in China a significant discourse concerning whether these [White] women could "truly" become Chinese. Using two literary accounts of Chinese-Western intermarriage, one fictional and the other nonfictional, as a starting point, my paper will consider various arguments concerning the racial and cultural boundaries of Chineseness, reading these arguments against Tu Wei-ming’s provocative concept of a "third symbolic universe" of "Cultural China." By considering those at the very margins of Chineseness (White women of Chinese nationality), I seek to probe the dynamic interplay between "Chinese" and "un-Chinese." This paper is furthermore intended to reverse prevailing contemporary assumptions concerning concepts such as "assimilation," "diasporic identities," and "transracial identities," which have been generally theorized in terms of "Third World" migration to the West, and not vice versa.

Jing Tsu, Rutgers University

During the late Qing period, the figure of the Chinese laborer (huagong) arrested intellectual, cultural, and nationalistic imagination. Not only cited as a victim paralleling the nation’s demise but also praised as the vanguard of China’s own colonial heroism, this diasporic figure stood at the crossroads of nationalism, empire, and colonialism. This paper looks at how literature and intellectual thought in early twentieth century China portrayed the experience of Chinese laborers in Southeast Asia, North America, and elsewhere as an exception to the theory of evolution. Diaspora was absorbed into the nationalistic imagination as sharing the same goal of extending the frontier of the dominance of the yellow race under China’s leadership. Seeing itself as a homeland rather than a site of departure, the memory of nationalism substituted its own desired narrative for that of a fragmented sense of cultural belonging. This paper reinterrogates the constitution of the diasporic frontier by bringing together discussions of nationalism, evolution, racial extinction, and geography on resettlement and exploration. Analyzing hitherto little known novels about the diasporic experience, such as Desolate Wind and Bitter Rain and Ice Mountains and Snowy Seas, I argue that nationalistic discourse strategized a "re-discovery" of the Chinese diaspora. With the aid of translated knowledge of western racial geography such as Elijah Coleman’s A Brief Geographical History of the United States of America, the nationalistic imagination reincorporated narratives of cultural exile into a renewed ambition for Chinese racial dominance and empire revival in the modern world.

Song Hwee Lim, University of Leeds, UK

In his keynote speech to a Chinese-language conference in Singapore in June 2004, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew reinvigorated his call for the learning of Chinese language and culture in the context of China’s emergence as a global economic power, stating that "Bilingualism gets us through the front door, but it is only through biculturalism that we can reach deep inside China and work with them." Invoking Lim Boon Keng (1869-1957), who was famously shamed into learning Chinese after his experience as a colonial subject in Britain, as an example who "promoted the Chinese language and Confucianism studies so that the Straits Chinese would not be a people without roots," Lee mobilized the rhetoric of roots searching (xungen) and the politics of shame in (post)colonial Singapore. Via a study of the Roots-searching School of literature in post-Mao China, this paper draws upon the synonym of the Chinese word "gen" with the male genital to argue that the project of constructing Chinese identity in Singapore is premised on the anxiety of castration. I also show that the shame/pride dyad, which occupies a central position in the epistemology of post-Stonewall gay identity, opens up a queer reading of the notion of Chineseness in Singapore. By queering "gen" as a non-reproductive organ, and by decoupling ethnic identity and language acquisition, this paper calls for new ways of conceptualizing and negotiating Chinese identities in postcolonial Singapore.