Minor speech with major significance: re-membering China in David Der-wei Wang's self-reflexive Monster*

Abstract

The paper argues that a project to re-member China lies embedded in The Monster that Is History as Wang examines the monstrous violence which ravages modern China through the lenses of fiction. Through the alchemy of what the author calls ‘diasporic ambivalence’, it finally assumes the form of huawen wenxue, or Sinophone literature. As the project inevitably encounters resistance from the Taiwanese nativist, it falls into an aporia/differend between Sinophone and Taiwanese literature as struggling means to constitute a community formation.