Kyle D. Shernuk

Is all literature written in Sinographs also all “Chinese” literature? This question probes the heart of Chinese Studies by querying the limits of a word that defines the field. "Sinoscapes" is a book-length project that answers this question by investigating the relationship between ethnicity, language, and Chineseness in contemporary Chinese language literatures. From the indigenous nations of Taiwan to Tibetans on China’s western frontier, and from the vanishing Evenki to the ubiquitous Han, this project adopts a comparative method that brings together ethnically diverse writers, who compose in Sinographs to reveal their unanticipated yet shared literary techniques, identity markers, and ideological positions. This project argues that these writers collectively produce Sinoscapes, or new horizons of Sino-inflected experiences that are otherwise obscured by current discourses about “China” and “Chineseness.”