Global English(es) and Global Chinese(s): toward rewriting a new literary history in Chinese

Abstract

In the process of the globalization in culture, English has become more and more powerful and hegemonic along with the obscurity of the boundary of nation-states. The blurring of the national identity has led to the variegation of language. Although people of almost all countries are learning the English language, the hegemonic position of the traditional ‘King's English’ or ‘Queen's English’ has gradually been deconstructed, with many global ‘englishes’ appearing in the contemporary English-speaking world and non-English-speaking world. This fact has also had a strong impact on the purity of Chinese, one of the newly emergent international languages. Along with the heightening of China's position as both an economic and political power in the world, the fever for learning Chinese will also rise in some non-Chinese-speaking countries. Like English, Chinese is also undergoing a sort of splitting: from one standard Chinese into different ‘Chineses’. Thus writing literary history could also be done by means of language rather than merely by that of country or nation. The essay concludes with the author's new model for rethinking literary historiography by calling for the rewriting of a new literary history in Chinese.

Notes

^1. The World Conference on Chinese was held in late July 2005 in Beijing, in which dozens of China's higher-ranking government officials as well as hundreds of overseas sinologists from various parts of the world participated and spoke. I view this event as a good beginning of the globalization of the Chinese language and culture which will also anticipate a new framework for Chinese–Western comparative literature studies in a global context.

^2. As far as the relationship between globalization or globalism and comparative literature, cf. Wang Ning, ‘Comparative literature and globalism: a Chinese cultural and literary strategy’, Comparative Literature Studies 41(4), (2004), pp. 584–602.

^3. In this respect, I should mention an exciting fact: Kang-i Sun Chang of Yale University and Stephen Owen of Harvard University have just finished editing a Cambridge History of Chinese Literature in two volumes, which is undoubtedly a good beginning for ‘demarginalizing’ or ‘globalizing’ Chinese literature although no domestic Chinese scholars were involved in this huge project. The Chinese translation of these two volumes will be published by Sanlian Shudian in Beijing.

^*Wang Ning is Zhiyuan Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiaotong University and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Tsinghua University in China. He is the author of over ten books in Chinese, as well as numerous articles published both in Chinese and English. His most recent English publications include Globalization and Cultural Translation (2004) and Translation, Globalization, and Localization: A Chinese Perspective (2008, co-edited with Sun Yifeng). This paper was originally delivered as a public lecture at Columbia University on 23 September 2005. The author sincerely expresses his gratitude to Gayatri C. Spivak and David Damrosch, whose kind invitation and generous support made the presentation possible. Thanks also go to Marshall Brown whose insightful ideas and suggestions made it possible for the author to revise the paper into the present form.

^4. Cf. Robert Burchfield, The English Language (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 169.

^5. Cf. Michael Singh et al., Appropriating English: Innovation in the Global Business of English Language Teaching (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).

^6. Cf. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 64.

^7. In this aspect, cf. Wang Ning, ‘The popularisation of English and the “decolonization” of Chinese critical discourse’, ARIEL, 31(1–2), (2000), pp. 411–424.

^8. Ironically speaking, Xin Dongfang Xuexiao (The New Oriental School), a non-government-run school, has made huge profits in the past few decades simply out of teaching young students how to get high marks in TOEFL and GRE.

^9. Rt Hon Lord Neil Kinnock, ‘Foreword’, in David Graddol, English Next (London: British Council, 2006), p. 1.

^12. Homi Bhabha, ‘Afterword: a personal response’, in Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valds, eds, Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 201–202.

^10. Humphrey Tonkin, ‘World language system’, in Roland Robertson and Jan Aart Scholte, eds, Encyclopedia of Globalization (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), Vol. 4, p. 1288.

^11. Cf. Homi Bhabha's keynote speech, ‘The Black Savant and the Dark Princess’, at the Tsinghua–Harvard Forum on Postcolonialism, 25 June 2002, Beijing.

^13. Due to some political reasons, in literary studies, Mao Zedong thought is an exception in China, characterized by his ‘Yan'an Talks’ on literature and art; but even so, its influence is now also fading.

^14. It is true that many of the Chinese American writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, have even forgotten how to speak and write in Chinese for the purpose of identifying themselves with those mainstream writers.

^15. Frankly speaking, writers like these two coming from mainland China are very rare, but their successes are indeed remarkable: Ha Jin (Jin Xuefei) was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, which marks that his literary creation has been recognized by American literary scholarship; Qiu Xiaolong's detective and mystery novels have so far been translated into 18 languages, which proves his popularity among ordinary readers of different languages.

^16. As for the history and status quo of Chinese American literature, cf. Chen Aimin, Chinese American Literature and Orientalism, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Shandong University, 2004.

^17. Along with the increasing popularization of Chinese, some international conference organizers also try to use Chinese as the working language, especially in discussing issues of Chinese culture and literature. For instance, at the International Conference on National Boundaries and Cultural Configurations, 23 June 2004 in Singapore, Chinese was exclusively the working language.

^18. Cf. Wang Gungwu, ‘Roots and changing identity of the Chinese in the United States’, Daedalus, (Spring 1991), pp. 181–206, especially see p. 184.

^19. When I was teaching in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the academic year of 2005–2006, I found there was a Chinese language school run by the local Chinese immigrants. Those studying there on a Sunday were not only children of these immigrants but also some local people who wanted to develop their careers in China.

^20. Although the Chinese Government has decided to set up hundreds of ‘Confucius Institutes’ worldwide, I do not think that Confucian doctrines will be taught, for ‘Confucius’ here is nothing but symbolic of Chinese language and culture. That is, these ‘Confucius Institutes’ are assigned to fulfill the task of teaching Chinese and promote Chinese culture worldwide.

^21. During my visiting professorship at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2005, I was notified that it was for the first time that student numbers learning Chinese had surpassed those learning Japanese. The same is true of Washington University in St. Louis.

^22. Cf. Fredric Jameson, ‘Notes on globalization as a philosophical issue’, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 55.

^23. Graddol, English Next, p. 22.

^24. Cf. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially pp. 1–36.

^25. Although Gayatri Spivak's challenging but controversial book more or less announces the death of comparative literature as a traditional discipline, she still calls for some new orientations of a new comparative literature in the era of globalization. Cf. Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), especially chs 1 and 3.

^27. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘What is literature for?’, New Literary History 38(1), (2007), pp. 16–17.

^26. Ralph Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in Ralph Cohen, ed., The Future of Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. vii–viii.

^28. See Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valds, ‘Preface: theorizing literary history in dialogue’, in Hutcheon and Valds, eds, Rethinking Literary History, p. ix.

^29. Marshall Brown, ‘Chapter Four: Rethinking the scale of literary history’, in Hutcheon and Valds, eds, Rethinking Literary History, p. 131.

^30. Paul Jay, ‘Beyond discipline? Globalization and the future of English’, PMLA 116(1), (January 2001), p. 33.

^31. Gay Wilentz, ‘English is a foreign anguish: Caribbean writers and the disruption of the colonial canon’, in Karen R. Lawrence, ed., Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canon (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 261.

^32. Cf. Tu Wei-ming's keynote speech, ‘Multicultural dialogue among civilizations’, delivered at the 9th Triennial Congress of Chinese Comparative Literature Association and the International Symposium, Beijing, 12 October 2008.