Emily Yu Zong reviews Everything Changes Ed. Xianlin Song and Nicolas Jose

What is meant by “transcultural”? The purpose of the collection, as the editors proclaim in the “Introduction,” is to outline “a field of transcultural writing that invites transcultural reading in response” (1). A recent buzzword in literary studies, the concept of “transcultural” is not new. In 1940, anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined the term “transculturation” to describe the mixing of cultures in his study of sugar and tobacco in colonial and postcolonial Cuba. Akin to the postcolonial concept of “hybridity,” “transculturation” refers to the blending and confluence of cultures at the contact zone, though it is hailed as transcending postcolonial dichotomies of centres and peripheries and more suitable to capture the synergetic and fluid nature of culture in globalised societies. “Transculturality” is in a continuum with yet distinct from other pluralist concepts of “interculturality” and “multiculturality” that, as German Philosopher Wolfgang Welsch suggests, presuppose a classical conception of culture as bounded and internally cohesive and risk reinforcing phenomena of “separation and ghettoisation” (4). By comparison, the “transcultural,” according to Song and Jose, is a “process” of dialogic interaction through which cultures become “inseparable” and thus “a factor of the times in which we live, an effect of mobility, migration, globalism, and connectivity, or multiple locations, identities and audiences” (2). In other words, the “transcultural” expresses a cultural sensibility that is more attuned to contemporary cultural horizons where borders of culture, ethnicity, nation, and language are investigated as permeable and identities more internally differentiated and complex. Transcultural writing speaks to literature’s capacity for border crossing, and in this case, for deepening the cultural exchange and people-to-people engagement between Australia and China that has accelerated since the 1980s.