Sinophone

This roundtable addresses recent developments in sinophone postcolonial studies with such questions as, How is sinophone studies as a distinct discipline taking shape while still retaining its interdisciplinary imperative? How does sinophone postcolonial studies both critically engage and disengage with the “rise of China”?

With this final chapter, then, this book’s focus on the PRC literary system gradually gives way to a discussion of a wider range of writings belonging to the realm of sinophone (or sinographic) literature.

On the other hand, she concedes that she has been able (in however limited a fashion) to take agentive actions to facilitate others’ socialization into and through Mandarin through programmatic activities she has contributed to. Thus, agency does not necessarily result in one’s own (sinophone or other) learning goals but may mediate others’ socialization, even when the facilitating or socializing agent is not herself an expert in the Chinese language.

To restrict the study of Persian poetry to the nation-state, despite its being written in a region extending from Turkey and Iran to Afghanistan and India, makes no more sense than to draw hard national boundaries around anglophone, sinophone, or hispanophone poetry.

Chu Ci 楚辞, or The Songs of the South (third century BC), one of the earliest anthologies of Classical Chinese poetry, is probably the least known work outside the sinophone or sinologist circles.

Heidegger’s reflections on the word Brauch (habit, use), often with reference to a quotation from Anaximander, mark the relationship between the Greek and the German language with archaisms difficult to comprehend and with an attitude of thinking that rejects rapid utilization. What I want to suggest, however, is that, if contemporary German philosophy is prepared to open itself up to possibilities of transcultural communication with sinophone or, more precisely, sino-grammatic philosophy at all, the use of such uselessness is imperative.

It mandates that all sinophones be put in exactly the same position as all anglophones, for otherwise the former’s right to use Chinese would be a lesser right than the right of the latter to use English.

Of course, local colloquial Chinese was for everybody the everyday language, as all of them were undivided sinophones.