The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia

Haun Saussy opens his thought-provoking and erudite monograph by asking a seemingly simple question: How has what is non-Chinese and on the perimeter defined the inside, the civilization of the Central States, especially with regard to the body of practices deemed most essential to the core of its civilization, writing and literary culture? To explore this question, Saussy takes the reader on a fascinating journey, temporally from the early Han through late imperial times and geographically from Vietnam and Hainan in the South to Tibet and Xinjiang in the West and the Tanguts and Mongols in the North.One might expect that a work on multilingual Asia would be preoccupied with translation. And indeed, Saussy begins by describing the nine relays of translation (jiu yi 九譯), a kind of bucket-brigade process whereby Chinese who ventured into central Asia during early Han expansions might have encountered a bilingual Sogdian who conveyed messages to a bilingual Parthian, who then spoke to a bilingual Tocharian, and so on (2–3). These early interactions, however, motivated as they often were by mercantile or political exigencies, were entirely oral/aural, since none of the peoples surrounding the Chinese appear to have had a written form of their language during the earliest period of recorded engagement. This fact forms the backbone of Saussy's enterprise here, since he is most interested in the construction of a seeming Chinese homogeneity, the conquest of distinct peoples, and the appropriation of their diverse perspectives into a single, unified medium: the Chinese written word. Part of what naturalized such ethnocentricisms among Chinese literati was the fact that they alone among their many encounters in the premodern period had a written language with a long history and a built-in “set of power relations and possible subject positions that were not easily opened to negotiation” (29).This changed with the coming of Buddhism, a tradition that made the foreign concrete and visible for the first time. The translation of Buddhist texts from a variety of Indic scripts and languages represents the overwhelming majority of literary translations in Chinese prior to the early modern period. Despite acknowledging this, Saussy wisely is not preoccupied with Buddhist sources here. This ground has been well covered by specialists, and Saussy himself has paid due attention to the acculturation of Buddhist texts in his recent Translation as Citation (2017), to which the work under review is a fitting follow-up. Instead, Saussy intends to show that this disproportion between native works and translated texts in Chinese is in itself a significant fact about Chinese literature and a cause for neglect in efforts to recover a silenced periphery.In his second chapter, Saussy asks the titular question, “Can the Barbarians Sing?,” framing the traditional Confucian pairing of rites and music as an assertion that genuine culture belongs to the political center and ultimately to the Son of Heaven as caretaker of human refinement. The various designations for “barbarian” in Chinese, yi 夷, di 狄, and so on, have “the effect of excluding people referred to from the realm of manners, morals, reason, ritual, music, li, and wen” (39). Of course, such defensive posturings, as Saussy notes, will only make sense to those “fearful of any invasion of otherness and unwilling to acknowledge the debts their culture owes to others it has chewed up and digested in the course of its development” (43). Despite these conservative reflexes among some native ideologues, foreign poetry and music continued to infiltrate and redefine the center, giving us ever more reason to question the homogeneity of identity markers in literary history.Chapter 3 picks up themes from both of the earlier chapters in contemplating the seemingly universalizing role that a morphosyllabic script like Chinese could have in uniting not only diverse speakers of Chinese topolects but an entire sinosphere of peoples in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, enabling their participation in Chinese literary culture from afar without translation. However, Japanese and Korean intellectuals did not merely provide a phonetic veneer for the naturalized Chinese text. Many would come to offer rival interpretations of the classic canon, treating Chinese as an alien language whose meaning was anything but transparent. It's also true that much genuine translation and communication happened outside of the Chinese monolingual ecumene. What is less clear to me, however, is that these cases constitute what Saussy calls a “most interesting part of the story of Chinese multiculturalism” (70), since it can hardly be assumed that these peoples routinely deferred to the sinocentric hubris represented in much of Chinese literati culture.Chapter 4 goes to the heart of these matters again. However much contemporary Chinese historians have attempted to trace an unbroken continuity with a stable center from the ancient Zhou period to the present, Saussy, wary of such teleological thinking, wants to ask: How did things look from the other side? He cites the Uyghur historian Kahar Barat, who, writing in Chinese, provocatively asserts that Han ethnicity is really over a hundred peoples brought together by the shared use of Chinese characters, without which there would be no Han ethnicity to speak of (94). By schooling children from diverse ethnicities in a single dominant language, local languages quickly recede into the background, many to the point of extinction. In the end, only a single version of history gets told.There have been times, nonetheless, when the Chinese literati simply could not ignore surrounding peoples. Some occurred when the periphery strikes at the center, as in the case of the An Lushan Rebellion or the Tibetan sacking of Chang'an in the eighth century. But there are also times when those from the center journey to the periphery, as in the case of exiles and emissaries, a topos Saussy explores in his fifth chapter. Although famous Tang literati such as Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan spent much of their exile bemoaning their fate among the “savages,” others like Su Shi, banished to the island of Hainan in the eleventh century, could embrace the local with a dose of humor and curiosity. Nevertheless, Su's poems betray the colonialist reflexes that were the only idiom available from his intellectual heritage: to assimilate the Li inhabitants of Hainan into “the grain-based, lineage-based, tax-paying way of life, the best way of life he knew” (120).This is comparative study at its finest, which, as Saussy argues, is fundamentally about noticing those parts of the master narrative that fall out of frame, for they permit us to see the frame as a frame in the first place (135). Any accounting of what it meant to be Chinese at any point in history will have to contend with those excluded, to recover their specific ways of not being Chinese in a sinocentric world. And one could hardly wish for a better guide through these tangled webs of literary history.