New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Chineseness should mean, how it should be represented, and who

should represent it as constituting the “myth of authenticity” or “cult

of purism” (Yeh 2000b).

The other contradiction underlying Li Rui’s argument is that, while

he disparages the imperialistic West as monopolizing the role as the

arbiter of world literature, he nevertheless continues to validate it by

acknowledging the serious consequence of notbeing taken seriously

by the West. “Under the [dominance of the Western literary] estab-

lishment,” he says, “Chinese literature is being looked down on in the

international arena, which means that Chinese people might begin to

lose their self-respect and their artistic independence” (Li 2000). But if

what Li says were true, then Chinese writers could never get out of the

quandary of self-representation. For if they won the approval of the

West, they would be called “sellouts”; but if they failed to matter to

the West, they would lose self-respect!

In my view, any insistence on defining and judging Chinese litera-

ture by Chineseness, in contradistinction from its counterparts from

the rest of the world, is problematic. To reify Chineseness is to put the

cart before the horse: if readers have acquired a sense of Chinese

literature, it should derive from the numerous individual works that

they have read over time, not from some a priori notion of

Chineseness that they are told to look for in works.

The irony of Li Rui’s criticism of the “Western literary establish-

ment” is that he sounds exactly like the academy in North America: the

critique of Western hegemony, the resistance from the non-West, the

embrace of cultural particularism, the demand for equal representation

and recognition based on ethnicity, nation, gender, and other categories.

Neil Larsen uses the term “inverted Eurocentrisms” to characterize a

similar phenomenon in Latin America: “[T]he dominant, Eurocentrist

culturalism of the center is matched by the contestatory culturalisms of

the periphery” (Larsen 1995: 134).

In her book, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism,

Rey Chow calls mimeticism “the central problematic in cross-ethnic

representation in the postcolonial world” (Chow 2002: 103). She

further divides it into three levels, with the third being the most

evolved and complex, where “the original that is supposed to be

replicated is no longer the white man or his culture but rather an

image, a stereotyped view of the ethnic,” such as “Asianness,”

“Africanness,” “Arabness,” and the like (107). Under the subheading

“I Protest, Therefore I Am: The Ethnic in the Age of Global Capital,”

Chow argues that ethnic representation and self-representation are

“firmly inscribed within the economic and ideological workings of

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