Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

for Sinophone subjects around the globe. Identity categories are products of time and space. Instead of functioning as the embodiment of a flexible structure for identity construction, the conventional notion of Chineseness creates a framework that subjugates individuals and robs them of their agency to obtain self-knowledge by privileging national, racial, and cultural discourses.

The following pages first address these issues and then propose a theoretical framework to unlearn, reinvent, and articulate Chinese culture and identities in the Sinophone. Through the introduction of this framework, I propose the significant role of Nanyang Chinese literary imaginaries in both Sinophone studies and the larger discourse of globalization and transnationalism. I posit that an identity category such as the Sinophone is not simply a tool for identification or an epitome of plural and fragmented representations; it is an actor of identity politics that encourages a repetitive process of fluctuating between being and becoming through the act of translation.

Chineseness: Origin of the Concept

As one begins to discuss the historical and structural development of Chineseness as an organizational concept, one must consider the convenient conflation of the concepts of race and ethnicity in contemporary society. In simple terms, the two are marked distinctively by biology and culture. Race is a category that identifies its subjects based on biological features, whereas ethnicity groups its subjects based on social and cultural practices. Even so, the very notion of race as biologically defined treads on slippery ground. Borrowing Judith Butler’s critique on the dichotomy of sex and gender, one can argue that the conventional distinction between race and ethnicity in race theory does not necessarily exclude biology from culture.¹¹ Race, like ethnicity, is a product of cultural discourses.¹² The fact that our society conveniently assigns biological components to a concept such as race in order to put forth racial difference as a notion of purity and authenticity against the less rigid structure of ethnic