Teaching Sinophone Literature and Film in the U.K. and Hong Kong
Pei-yin Lin, University of Hong Kong

As a modern Chinese literature and culture scholar who teach and research primarily on non-PRC literary works, I find the Sinophone approach relevant and useful to my course design in general. No matter whether one lines up with Shu-mei Shih’s postcolonial imperative or David Der-wei Wang’s loyalist-focused take, the Sinophone framework is effective in shying away from China-centrism and ensuring the multiple manifestations of Chinese culture and identity. In the U.K. where I taught for five years (January 2007 to December 2011), due to the existing area studies disciplinary division, Sinophone framework is not always highlighted in the curriculum of 20 th -century Chinese literature and culture. The courses that are offered in the Chinese section of the Department of East Asian Studies, such as the University of Cambridge and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), are usually titled conventionally as modern Chinese literature, although non-PRC works are included and faculty members’ research is not limited to PRC texts. However, under the big umbrella of “Chinese literature” in a broad sense, literary works from China proper, especially by those canonical writers from the May Fourth period, remain dominant…

Institutional Commitments, Sinophone Disruptions: Notes on Teaching the Sinophone in the South of Taiwan
Mark McConaghy, National Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Chinese Literature

The Taiwanese classroom in 2020 is a profoundly Sinophone space. Take, for example, a seminar I taught last year entitled “Topics in the Global Chinese Humanities” (全球華文專題), which featured eight students in all. My oldest “student” was a retired professor who was born in Beijing before the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Taiwan is one of the most rapidly aging societies in the world, and in recent years universities have become spaces retirees return to after careers in other fields. The class also featured a civil-servant in his mid-50s from neighboring Pingdong county, whose native spoken language is southern Taiwanese Minnan. This student was working to increase cultural programming that raises awareness of the complex local history of the island’s southernmost county. There were also two students from Mainland China- one from Zhejiang province whose spoke the Wu dialect fluently and the other from far northern Heilongjiang who was conversant only in Mandarin. The class also featured four students in their twenties from Taiwan, whose native-places range across the island, and were themselves defined by a diverse set of professional occupations and intellectual orientations…

“Sinophone Studies 101: Course Prerequisite—Curricular, Scholarly, and Translational Plenitude”
Brian Bernards, University of Southern California

I was sitting in my campus office one afternoon in early 2012 preparing for my next class when I received a call from the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs at my institution. I was a newly minted PhD in my first year of a highly prized tenure-track position, and my colleagues had repeatedly advised me—for the sake of my tenure profile—to not only meet all of my institution’s research and publication benchmarks as efficiently and effectively as possible, but to also cultivate friendly and collegial professional relationships with members of the university administration. For that reason, I did not push back when, on that phone call, the Associate Dean relayed the message that before approval would be granted for a new undergraduate class I had proposed, the undergraduate curriculum committee insisted that I change the course’s title from “Sinophone Literatures and Cultures” (deliberately pluralized) to “Global Chinese Literature and Culture.”…

Teaching Queer Sinophone Cultures Transnationally
Alvin K. Wong, The University of Hong Kong

The publication of Shu-mei Shih’s 2007 book Visuality and Identity inaugurated the field of Sinophone studies. The Sinophone refers to “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries.” Shih powerfully challenges the methodological assumption in area studies that has traditionally privileged the centrality of the People’s Republic of China as an object of study. Conceptually, “Sinophone studies disrupts the chain of equivalence established, since the rise of nation-states, among language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality” in the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where Mandarin (or guoyu in Taiwan) as written and spoken language buttresses Han-centrism of various kinds. In cases where Sinitic-language communities and cultures occupy the cultural margins, Sinophone Malaysians, Koreans, Australians, and Chinese-Americans…

Breaking the Narrative Arc: Teaching Sinophone Studies as a PRC Studies Scholar
Emily Wilcox, College of William and Mary

Where do the boundaries of China lie? How should we define what is Chinese? Whose voices and issues matter most for understanding the Chinese world past and present? Every summer, when I am dreaming up new classes or revising old syllabi in preparation for the coming semester, these questions are often at the forefront of my mind. I would argue that all faculty who teach courses with the terms “China” or “Chinese” in the title should be asking these questions…