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

Just as the Orient in Orientalist discourses exists to demonstrate Western superiority, the “represented” realities of the Third World perpetuate the hierarchy between the West and the Third World.

It is in this sense that literary criticism is not simply “nation-oriented” as Lydia Liu argues,²⁸ but it is largely nationalistic. In containing Third World literature in nationalist discourses while crediting Western literature with multi-dimensional qualities, literary criticism of the West declares the victory of the Western nations.

Western scholars are not the only critics who are responsible for this cultural hierarchy between the West and the Third World, however. Many Third World scholars, while recognizing this problem, have been confined in the same discourse of “representational inevitability” and played their role in essentializing their ethnic or national culture. Although positive images are strongly promoted to counter negative images of Orientalist tradition, these scholars deny, just like Western scholars, the complexity and fluidity of their cultures, excluding or forbidding any literary representation other than those serving nationalist purposes. Instead of challenging the discourse of “representational inev­itability,” they internalize a sense of inferiority and are in fact more sensitive about the question of representation and much more concerned with the representational legitimacy of literary works. The ethnic or national space, thus produced and reproduced, is still fixed and unchangeable. The same hierarchical structure of power is employed although the positions of the West and Third World are switched. Literary criticism therefore becomes an integral part of nationalist discourses in the Third World.

“Representational inevitability” serves as a form of discursive control of the literary canon and the Third World. It works closely with a similar Orientalist tokenism in canon formation, which David Leiwei Li argues is “the hidden mechanism of a ‘canonical quota.’”²⁹ While the “canonical quota” may be a step forward from the previous total erasure, it makes sure that only a few Third World literary works are included. The theoretical equation of literariness with ethnicity makes it justifiable to include just one literary work from a specific ethnic group, since this one work is enough to represent “the whole humanity of its people in culture and politics.”³⁰