Community Reimagination in Chinese Literary and Art Criticism Today

Abstract Area studies, as institutionalized in Western academia, has historically operated through a logic of binary opposition, producing knowledge frameworks oriented toward governance, control, and strategic management of designated regions. Within this paradigm, knowledge about China has often rendered it as an externalized and alien object — one with which Western publics are discouraged from identifying or affiliating. At the same time, segments of Chinese scholarship have been shaped by a Cold War epistemology that privileges a “China and the world” model over a “China of the world” approach, presuming a fixed and impermeable boundary between China and the rest of the globe. These conceptual divides have been further intensified by recent trade disputes and the proliferation of polarized media discourses surrounding Chinese and American peoples, cultures, and societies. Against this backdrop, the eight articles in this special section — contributed by scholars based in both the United States and China — examine the world relations embedded in Chinese literary texts from antiquity to the contemporary period. Collectively, they foreground literature as a site of transregional entanglement and relational world-making, revealing a dynamic global system of connections in which China has long been embedded. By rethinking China not as a bounded entity but as constitutive of multiple world formations, this special section seeks to unsettle inherited epistemic borders and to renew intellectual and cultural bonds capable of moving beyond the divisions and fragmentations of the present.