Writing in a Cosmopolitan Age: Considerations of Ethnicity and Transculturalism in Sino-French Literature

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, French literature has turned from a national to a transnational model, making way for theories that emphasize correlations between a culture's literary productions and such political and social processes as immigration and globalization. This article explores how Chinese diasporic and exile literature fits into this new transnational paradigm, particularly Sino-French literature. First, the article discusses the surprising contradiction of Sino-French novels: that on one hand, these novels’ transcultural features infuse contemporary French literature with cosmopolitanism, while on the other hand, their preponderantly ethnic model reinforces the preeminence within the cultural diaspora of the Chinese nation. Second, I argue that the intrinsically metaphorical nature of the Chinese language is an essential factor in Sino-French novels’ creation of a new literary language. This new language is highly valued by the French literary establishment and has greatly contributed to the institutionalization of this literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Sino-French
• Beur literature
• cosmopolitanism
• ethnicity
• transcultural

Notes

1. Literature produced by writers whose mother tongue (or even second language) is not French.

2. Introduced by Ulrich Beck in 2006, the term describes a passive, unconscious, and sometimes unwanted process, an epistemological reality in which the universal and the particular, the similar and the dissimilar, the local and the global are to be conceived as interconnected. This should not mislead us into thinking that we are all becoming cosmopolitans: if the world exists in a state of global interdependence, a part of its actors are still unaware of this interconnectedness, and continue to promote a cultural ghettoization.

3. Unofficially, there are around one million Chinese living in France. Some of the famous names of Chinese cultural diaspora are Liu Binyan and Bei Dao in the United States, Gu Cheng in New Zealand, Yang Lian and his wife Yo Yo in the UK, Zhang Zao in Germany, Li Li in Sweden, Duo Duo in Canada, Holland, and Germany.

4. The list of Sino-French writers is growing. The inventory only took into consideration Ya Ding, Shan Sa, Dai Sijie, François Cheng, and Gao Xingjian.

5. The Asian-American literature is already at its second generation of writers.

6. Zhong Guo in Chinese.

7. “less a valorization of the other, and more a self-criticism, and less the description of a reality, and more the construction of an ideal” (my translation).

8. “There is a literary value attached to certain languages […], on account of the prestige of the written texts” (my translation).

9. “It is so intimately linked to my practical life, as well as my interior life, that it proves to be the emblem of my destiny” (my translation).

10. A sort of French spelling bee contest, open to all countries.

11. In order to differentiate meaning, the same syllable can be pronounced with different tones.

12. The same character can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective, in function of its place in the clause.

13. “At the branches’ ends, magnolia flowers” (my translation).

14. The fact that François Cheng has written a whole book (Le Dialogue) dedicated to this “intranslability” between French and Chinese, and, at the same time, to the fascinating complementarity of the two (one is too vague, the other too precise), is not without importance. The first French person of Asian origin to have attained literary fame, it would take him more than twenty years to develop a profound knowledge of the two systems, and to craft his career of “languages linkman” (“passeur de langues” in original). Using his story as a sort of paragon to measure the progress of other Chinese tempted by the Francophone verb, the fast integration of all the other, much younger, writers, seems remarkable indeed, even though between his arrival and the arrival of younger writers in France things have changed considerably.

15. This literature is French and Chinese at the same time, especially when considering that some of the Sino-French writers are the translators of their own books in Chinese.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ileana D. Chirila

Ileana D. Chirila is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of New Hampshire. Her areas of research include transcultural/transnational literatures, contemporary Francophone literature, cosmopolitanism, Romani diaspora, and multiculturalism. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Reinventing the Republic: Sino-French Literature in the Cosmopolitan Age.