Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Cont ...

Hall’s three modes of reading acknowledge the possibilities of interpretation beyond the limitation of dualism while Fish’s notion of “interpretive communities” shows even more flexibility in capturing the different discursive interpretations that have produced the controversies. Recognizing the complicated and fluid power relations among different interpretive communities, this project is a feminist cultural production of the debates on women authors of color. It decodes the different discourses practiced and reproduced in the debates, challenges dominant discursive appropriation and control of feminisms and women authors of color, and produces alternative meanings for the controversial texts.

Representational Inevitability vs. Cultural Production

The controversy of women authors of color (global Chinese women authors in this case) is centered on these authors’ mis / representation of the racial or national communities as well as on the critics’ mis / interpretation of the texts. The root of the controversy on women authors of color is “representational inevitability,” a common but very limited approach to authors of color. In his discussion of literary criticism on ethnic writers in the United States, David Leiwei Li—argues that a community relationship exists between an ethnic writer and the ethnic community as a result of historical “underrepresentation” and “involuntary representation,” which have produced a simultaneous “lack” of artistic and cultural presence and an “abundance” of imposed stereotypes. Therefore, Li states “[t]hat a piece of ethnic literature is deemed exemplary and its author designated a community spokesperson provides the basic context in which works of minority art are received.”²²

In such a “basic context” of reception for authors of color, the ultimate question is whether a particular author of color represents or misrepresents the social and cultural realities of his or her national or racial community. Women authors of color often challenge prejudices, particularly on the issue of gender, within their national or racial spaces, and they are therefore caught in the representational trap.