Visuality and Identity

"The reader may be startled by the juxtaposition of visual and phonic in the title of this stimulating volume. Shih does it with a purpose. The Sinophone refers more to a people than a voice, as the basis for affinity across global spaces, that confers a commonality upon them even as they follow diverse historical trajectories. The visual confirms this commonality, even as it opens up those same people to forces of cultural globalization, forces that themselves both unite and divide. The deconstruction of categories such as China or Chineseness always seems to invite their reconstruction on new bases. Shih offers a novel and illuminating account of this double motion in the contemporary production of a 'global Chinese' (Sinophone) culture through visual media. An important addition to cultural and diasporic studies in the China field."—Arif Dirlik, author of Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism

"Against the backdrop of what she calls the Sinophone Pacific—that representational time-space traversed by polyphonic articulations of de-standardized Chineseness as well as by myriad visual mediations— Shu-mei Shih offers an admirably global vision for minoritized culture production. Her analysis of gender, class, language, and cultural politics is as trenchant as her challenge to China-centrism is timely. A remarkable critical accomplishment."—Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University

“Tracing the spectral production of 'Chinese' identity as it is disseminated globally, Shih boldly moves away from using place (ethnicity) and the body (race) to anchor Chinese identity, to argue that the visual (film) and the verbal (language and linguistics) are the most salient ones in the modern and contemporary historical formation. She succeeds brilliantly.”—David Palumbo-Liu, author of Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier