Framing Sinophone Cinemas

Abstract

The concept of the’ sinophone’ has received critical traction in recent years as a robust theoretical tool to consider a range of Chinese language cultural productions that have emerged on the margins of China and the global Chinese diasporas. The concept was coined by Shu-mei Shin, in Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (2007) to respond to the expiration of the Chinese diaspora as second and third generations become more localized. Shih considers the unifying concept of the Chinese diaspora problematic because it is linked to China through the population category of the ‘huaqiao’/‘overseas Chinese’. This category affirms a Han-centric origin and excludes other ethnicities, languages and cultures; it also supports the Western racialized construction of the diaspora as foreign. ‘Chineseness’, she states, ‘is not an ethnicity but many ethnicities’ (Shih, 2007, p. 24). The Sinophone removes the emphasis on ethnicity and nationality, and instead highlights communities of Sinitic language cultures spoken and used outside China and on the peripheries of China and Chineseness: it is ‘a place-based, everyday practice and experience, and thus it is a historical formation that constantly undergoes transformation reflecting local needs and conditions’ (Shih, 2007, p. 30).