The Southern Discourse in Sinophone Literature:
Moving Borders
Edited by Chia-rong Wu, Min-xu Zhan, Alison Groppe, Yenna Wu. Routledge, 2025.
Ian Rowen
Associate Professor
Institute for Advanced Study, Kyushu University
The editors introduce this volume as "an anthology of research that connects to the essential topic of the Global South and calls attention to the formulation and proliferation of Sinophone literature through the lens of Southwardism." Southwardism, they continue, "embodies the theoretical discourse for articulating, if not advocating, the experiences, challenges, and opportunities of the Sinophone South, thus creating a nuanced and inclusive global narrative." It seems that much of the globe and its people may fall under the remit of the book.
Indeed, this volume is concerned with expanding the arena of the "Sinophone" — the agenda for which is largely set in the US academy — with scholarship on the "Global South" — the agenda for which is largely set in the US academy — through lenses such as identity politics and social justice — the agenda for which is also largely set in the US academy. That the volume then sets out to challenge Western-centric and China-centric knowledge production is an irony the introduction does not address.
To be fair to the editors, they acknowledge it obliquely. Taiwan, they note, was officially removed from lists of the Global South in 2016, but "should be identified as an important site that contributes to the development of the Southern discourse." The normative "should" is doing considerable work here, quietly conceding that the volume's central category does not straightforwardly apply to one of its primary cases. One contributor notes the definitional comedy with some precision: Taiwan "is on the list of the Global North countries that the International Monetary Fund used for the scoping review, but it is not featured on the list of Global South countries published by the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World." The South, it turns out, depends on who is doing the measuring — and Taiwan's place is as hard to measure as ever.
The pairing of frameworks is genuinely ambitious. Thinking "Sinophone studies" alongside the Global North-Global South distinction and the Chinese north-south divide requires coordinating at least three distinct analytical traditions across a geographically dispersed editorial team — Chia-rong Wu at Canterbury, Min-xu Zhan at National Chung Hsing, Alison Groppe at Oregon, Yenna Wu at UC Riverside. This decentered editorial geography is one of the volume's most significant features, distinguishing it from the more institutionally concentrated Sinophone Studies productions organized from a University of California campus. Whether this leads to intellectual decentering, or merely institutional decentering, is the question the volume itself prompts.
The book covers a wide geographical, thematic, and methodological range, including Singapore women writers, a Macanese poet, Hong Kong literary journals, and more. Most of the chapters are excellent and would stand on their own. The editors' summary prose, which describes each contribution as having "adeptly," "judiciously," "insightfully," "discerningly," "meticulously," or "ingeniously" achieved its aims — before, as they note of one section-closing chapter, "reaching a strong finish" — does them few favors by comparison. The chapters earn their own defense.
The geopolitical vector of the project is confounded by the acute observation of several scholars within the volume who note that the southernness of Hong Kong and Macau under conditions of British and Portuguese colonialism puts them in very different positions than the subalternity implied by critiques using the name of the Global South. This complexity adds an East-West axis of difference on top of the center-periphery difference of the Sinophone, grafted here to a Global South-Global North distinction. The spectre of "the Cantophone" troubles the disciplinary centering effort of "the Sinophone," which predicates itself on the minor transnationalism of the periphery.
The most interesting revelations the volume offers may be inadvertent. Several chapters ignore or exceed the frameworks they are supposedly employing. The very first chapter, Hsinya Huang's "Taiwan in Relations: Reclaiming Austronesian Commons," does not mention the Sinophone at all, and instead treats Taiwan as "central hub of Austronesia" and "indigenous Oceania," operating from within trans-Indigenous Pacific studies — a tradition with its own distinct genealogy. Huang uses Tao writer Syaman Rapongan to advance this claim through a vision of multispecies Pacific commoning in which flying fish migrations and oceanic currents constitute Indigenous solidarity across borders. The reading is romantic. What it cannot quite acknowledge is that Syaman's writings consistently position himself as oceanic, Indigenous, and West Pacific, resisting incorporation into Taiwan's national literary framework — his radical alterity is precisely the alterity of someone who declines the claim being made on his behalf. Taiwanese scholars are remarkably interested in claiming Syaman; Syaman is remarkably interested in not being claimed.
Min-xu Zhan's chapter on Yang Mu directly names what the volume circles without resolving. Drawing on Fanon, Zhan argues that "Sinophone literature encompasses rich Southern landscapes and colonial history, but these Southern literary resources have been punctured by Northern ideological gazes, leading Southern Sinophone writers to view the world through the Northern point of view." The conclusion follows with uncomfortable precision: "the Southern discourse often ends up being synonymous with the Northern discourse, leaving Sinophone literature devoid of a southern perspective." Zhan cites Andrea Bachner's concept of "triangulated translation" — the structural situation in which minor literatures can only recognize each other through the mediation of Western literary centers — and notes, not without hope, that a more proactive and liberating southern discourse "is something to look forward to." The implication is that it does not yet exist.
This is a problem that this book cannot escape. The global Sinophone studies scholarship– as deployed in a number of these essays – and the Global North-South scholarship, approached more experimentally here if at all – misrecognize each other through exactly the triangulation Zhan describes: frameworks that have emerged in parallel that remain reliant on Euro-American academic recognition.
Some chapters demonstrate the productive instability of the volume's organizing frameworks simply by doing their work carefully. Irmy Schweiger applies Isabel Hofmeyr's critique of the Global South concept — its tendency toward "a 'south from above' perspective" that risks "formulating a new master narrative" — before reading Lung Ying-tai through a phenomenological framework of resonance and deceleration. Lung is a waishengren writer whose southern landscape is the Taiwanese south, and who has attracted criticism in Taiwan for her perceived Chinese cultural nationalism. The south keeps slipping. The chapter is generative and inconclusive in productive ways.
Lucas Klein's reading of Bei Dao argues that any text worth reading is worth reading in as many contexts as it can bear — Chinese, Asian American, and Hong Kong Sinophone simultaneously. He concludes that Bei Dao's poem "is Chinese, is Asian American, and is Hong Kong Sinophone all at once, even though — or, indeed, because — such categories are usually considered to be mutually exclusive." The argument is conducted almost entirely within Shih's conceptual orbit, producing a pluralism that David Der-wei Wang's framework might reach through entirely different premises and political valences — suggesting the two positions may share certain features even as they contest each other's terms.
Brian Skerratt's concluding chapter on Macau is self-aware about the volume's problematic. He opens by noting the familiar "place where East meets West" framing of Macau before asking what it means to read the same material through a North-South lens instead, observing that the Global South framework's "timeframe is narrowly contemporary, while its binary division of the world is, as much as that of the colonial orientalists, Eurocentric." His reading of the Macanese poet Un Sio San closes not on the utopian note the volume's introduction gestures toward but on "misrecognition and willful ignorance" — a world where the promised flows of cross-cultural connection turn out to be characterized by people looking past each other. It is, as closing chapters go, an honest one.
Some chapters do not engage either "Sinophone" or "Global South" as anything more than nominal frames. Yenna Wu's piece on curry rice in the work of Li Ang is a fine essay that simply doesn't need either framework. Pei-yin Lin's chapter on migrant worker fiction uses "Global South" as a metaphor for "a self-reflexive and ethics-informed practice that examines imbalanced relations between minority and dominant cultures" — portable, generative, untethered from any particular geography. Chris Song discusses "Cantophone" writers with care and rigor.
Ng Kim Chew, Chang Kuei-hsing, and Lee Yung-ping appear in the introduction as exemplary Sinophone Malaysian writers whose "double disposition" the volume aims to illuminate. Ng Kim Chew has also published a pointed critique arguing that the Sinophone framework misrepresents the Malaysian Chinese community's actual relationship to China and its literary traditions, calling it an "American product" that repackages what Southeast Asian Chinese scholars built for themselves into a multinational brand headquartered elsewhere. This critique goes unacknowledged. The dynamic is not unique to this volume, but it is visible here with particular clarity.
The introduction has a helpful footnote indicating it was adapted from a Chinese-language special issue of the Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities in 2021. It would have been useful to know whether the volume grew directly from that issue, or came together through another institutional impetus — the relationship between journal special issue and edited volume matters for understanding how the field's knowledge production actually works.
This volume is better realized than comparable recent collections. Its editorial geography is distributed, its chapter quality consistently high, and its willingness to include work that doesn't fully conform to the organizing frameworks is, whatever the editors' intentions, genuinely productive. Zhan's chapter alone, with its insistence that a liberating southern discourse remains "something to look forward to," does more for the field's self-awareness than a dozen affirmative deployments of the Sinophone concept. What the volume inadvertently demonstrates is that its most reflexive chapters tend to identify the frameworks' limits more sharply than they demonstrate the frameworks' powers — which is not necessarily a failure. A field that can generate this quality of self-interrogation may be finding its most productive phase.
