European Geographies in Contemporary Sinophone Literatures

Bringing geo-literary approaches into dialogue with Sinophone studies, this book explores the place of Europe as a cultural and spatial formation in contemporary Sinophone literatures.The volume surveys the material and immaterial signs through which contemporary Sinophone authors have imagined, crossed, inhabited, and textualized Europe. It develops a literary cartography of the meanings attributed to European spaces, while foregrounding the polyphony and multidimensionality of the Sinophone literary world and its significance within and for Europe. Organized around the notions of location, dislocation, and relocation, the book explores how Sinophone writing unsettles fixed geographical and cultural coordinates. By tracing the changing relations between literary subjects and the spaces they inhabit, the contributors show how the distinctions between proximity and distance, familiarity and difference, can themselves become unstable. They challenge China-centered approaches to Chinese-language cultural production along with the tendency to treat “the West” as a homogeneous category. The book also highlights how engagement with Europe reshapes questions of identity, positionality, and cultural belonging within the Sinophone. This volume shows how Sinophone writing contributes to a more complex understanding of Europe itself, while opening new directions for the study of literary space, mobility, cultural mediation, and the changing cartographies of the Sinophone.