Shu-mei Shih

Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition

SHU-MEI SHIH has a split appointment in East Asian languages and cultures, comparative literature, and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 19171937 (2001); the editor of Globalization: Taiwans (In)Significance, a special issue of Postcolonial Studies (Summer 2003); and a coeditor, with Francoise Lionnet, of the forthcoming volume Minor Transnationalism.

The Creolization of Theory

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and “French theory” originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chance, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Edouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities. Contributors . Etienne Balibar, Dominique Chance, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Edouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Francoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter, or "When" Does a "Chinese" Woman Become a "Feminist"?

In the spring of 1988, I found myself sitting next to Zhang Jie, perhaps the most prominent woman writer in China at the time, at a reception in Beijing for American writers hosted by the Chinese Ministry of Culture. As the interpreter/translator for the American delegation, I had acquired the derivative power of proximity to prominent American and Chinese writers to enjoy a sumptuous banquet and to serve as the intermediary of conversation and cultural exchange. One of the questions that was frequently raised by the American delegation, especially by women writers during that reception and later during meetings in Beijing, Chengdu, and Shanghai, was whether Chinese women writers were keen on expressing feminist intent and exposing female oppression. Upon hearing the question thus posed and translated in my Taiwanese-inflected terminology, Zhang Jie appeared to be ill at ease. Despite the fact that she was then the most acclaimed writer of female sensibility, she replied after a short pause that there was no such thing as “feminism” (nuxing zhuyi or nuquanzbuyi) in China and that she would not call herself a “feminist” or a “feminist writer.” This was my first trip to China as a Korean-born, Taiwan- and U.S.-educated ethnic Chinese residing in California, and, out of sheer ignorance, I understood her categorical rejection to be the expression of her care to avoid making any anti-official statements at a state-sponsored event.

Theory, Asia and the Sinophone

This article examines the politics of the majoritarian binary, ‘The West and the Rest’, and more specifically, ‘Western Theory, Asian Reality’, as a politics of power that serves specific interests ranging from imperialism and nationalism to the suppression of heterogeneity in languages, ethnicities, and cultures. The Sinophone is posited here as a presence, literary and otherwise, that interrupts this majoritarian binary by challenging the chain of equivalence among ethnicity, language, and nationality.

Is the Post- in Postsocialism the Post- in Posthumanism?

DOI 10.1215/016424721468308

Conversation on ‘Feminist Imperialism and the Politics of Difference'

Shu-mei Shih: Thank you, Sylvia, for being willing to do this interview. You mentioned earlier to me that you can actually pinpoint the moment when the exercise of international colonialism by First World feminists became visible and palpable. Previous to that, there seemed to have been more of a participatory relationship among different feminists across international divisions. However, you pinpointed this moment when “Western” feminists began increasingly taking over the forum of discussion among different feminists across international divisions. You located it around 1993 or 1994. I would be interested in knowing what exactly led you to think this way, what transpired previous to that moment, and how the relationship between First and “Third World” feminists has changed in the past few years. And this all, of course, is partly in reference to Chandra Mohanty’s foundational work in which she talks about how First World feminists have not recognized the concerns of “Third World” feminists and about the kinds of discussions circulating around the issues of cultural difference: how cultural differences actually present women’s issues in very different lights. The “Western” liberal feminist paradigm cannot be used in talking about “Third World” women’s issues, and so forth, and the fact that First World feminists do not recognize the importance of these differences.