Abstract This article juxtaposes eight contemporary Sinophone fictions of Han-Indigenous encounters from China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Hong Kong to bring together a comparative grid of positionalities relative to the varied processes of localization by disavowing, appropriating, negotiating, and/or relativizing Indigeneity. Each represents a locally specific response to the historical tangle of imperial racism, postcolonial nation-building, settler colonialism, diasporic displacement, and localist desire, at which intersection Indigeneity often becomes politicized (by settlers) as a romantic imaginary of timeless affiliation with land and history, and sexualized (by men) as a feminine symbol of exotic otherness and colonial objectification. As Sinophone writers work through this entanglement, the political eroticism of Indigeneity becomes the conjuncture where exoticist imperialist Sinocentrism and decolonial minor transnationalism negotiate their sameness and difference. Since Indigeneity guards the inner frontiers of the modern regime of authenticity, empire, nation-state, and statelessness varyingly inform and inflect Sinophone literary expressions of localization and its discontents; in certain cases, this uncanny intermixture enables a radical critique of state sovereignty and its fetishism of Indigeneity. To reckon with the internal disparities of these articulations, this article argues, will be crucial for working toward a non-nativist critique of settler colonialism and grappling with Sinophone decoloniality.
Wayne CF Yeung (Sun,) studied this question.