From the Editor

The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere, edited by Pheng Cheah (University of California-Berkeley) and Caroline S. Hau (Kyoto University), reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sinosphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history. Pointing out that the history of imperialism in China and Southeast Asia is longer and more complex than Euro-American imperialism, the contributors complicate the traditional postcolonial binaries of center-periphery, colonizer-colonized, and developed-developing.

Among other topics, they examine socialist China’s attempts to break with Soviet cultural hegemony; the postcoloniality of Taiwan as it negotiates the legacy of Japanese colonial rule; Southeast Asian and South Asian diasporic experiences of colonialism; and Hong Kong’s complex colonial experiences under the British, the Japanese, and mainland China. The contributors show how postcolonial theory’s central concepts cannot adequately explain colonialism in the Sinosphere. Challenging fundamental axioms of postcolonial studies, this volume forcefully suggests that postcolonial theory needs to be rethought.

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Preface / Carlos Rojas  vii
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: Situations and Limits of Postcolonial Theory / Pheng Cheah  1

Part I. Framing the Postcolonial
1. Mythmaking: The Nomos of Postcoloniality / Robert J. C. Young  33
2. On Twenty-First-Century Postcolonialism / Dai Jinhua, translated by Erebus Wong and Lisa Rofel  53

Part II. Chinese Socialist Postcoloniality
3. Who Owns Social Justice? Permanent Revolution, the Chinese Gorky, and the Postcolonial / Wendy Larson  71
4. De-Sovietization and Internationalism: The People’s Republic of China’s Alternative Modernity Project / Pang Laikwan  90

Part III. Hong Kong Postcoloniality among the British, Japanese, and Chinese Empires
5. From Manchukuo to Hong Kong: Postcolonizing Asian Colonial Experiences / Lo Kwai-Cheung  109
6. Decolonization? What Decolonization? Hong Kong’s Political Transition / Lui Tai-lok  127
7. Locating Anglophone Writing in Sinophone Hong Kong / Elaine Yee Lin Ho  148

Part IV. Taiwan Postcoloniality between Japanese and Chinese Colonialisms
8. The Slippage between Empires: The Production of the Colonized Subject in Taiwan / Lin Pei-yin  171
9. Questions of Postcolonial Agency: Two Film Examples from Taiwan / Liao Ping-hui  191
Part V. Diasporas in East and Southeast Asian Postcoloniality
10. Sinophone Geopoetics: From Postcolonialism to Postloyalism / David Der-wei Wang  213
11. Multiple Colonialisms and Their Philippine Legacies / Caroline S. Hau  232
12. Diasporic Worldliness in Postcolonial Globalization / Pheng Cheah  250

References  277
Contributors  313
Index  315