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

The significance of such a text lies purely in its social and political merits while its artistic value, if any, is negligible except to serve as a means to achieve that social function. In fact, the text is the reality of Third World nations. Or more accurately, literary criticism of this framework turns the text into a reality of the Third World. This framework of literary criticism is not unlike Fredric Jameson’s observation on Third World literature as “national allegories.”²⁵ Jameson is not the first to link Third World literature to the concept of nation, but he certainly helps to solidify this link that results from and at the same time reproduces unequal power relations between the West and the Third World.

Behind the discourse of “representational inevitability” is a constructed cultural superiority of the West over the Third World, assumed by many Western scholars and internalized by many Third World researchers. In the first place, the relation between the West and the Third World is that of theory and experience. That is, scholarships concerning Western cultures often assume universality whereas those dealing with Third World cultures have to spell out their national or ethnic specificities, as Rey Chow points out, even when theoretical issues are explored. As a result, such studies are considered “too narrow or specialized to warrant general interest.”²⁶ Similarly, Western litera­ture is considered to be capable of exploring all aspects of humanity as well as aesthetic development in general, while Third World literature is fixed within limited time and space.

This theoretical approach reproduces an essentialized, exoticized, and necessarily inferior Third World culture, denying it the diversity, fluidity, and sophistication accorded to the West. It is also a part of the Orientalist tradition Edward Said discusses. Said illustrates vividly the sometimes dangerous power of the critics, especially those in academia who publish texts “purporting to contain knowledge about something actual.” In other words, Western critics and scholars “can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.”²⁷ The discourse of “representational inevitability,” with its explicit equation of literary representation with Third World realities, makes the constructed inferiority of Third World realities even more real.