Writing the Self “in the Language of the Other”: Chinese Memoirs and the Politics of English

This paper is a study of Chinese memoirs in English, and it resituates the postcolonial debates on the politics of English under the new global conditions. Since the mid-1980s a substantial number of Chinese nationals started to write discursively about their experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) across national and linguistic borders; Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai (1986) and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991) are often considered to be the forerunners of this emergent literary formation. That these Chinese writers have chosen to write in English about their personal traumatic experience compels us to reconsider the global spread of English and its implications. In the postcolonial critique of the politics of English, the global spread of English has often been attributed to the history and practice of British colonialism. Postcolonial writers and critics, however, have yet to explain the continuing spread and domination of English as the de facto international language at the present time. Despite the demise of the British Empire after the Second World War, English has remained to be the most widely used language both within and outside anglophone societies. This paper argues that it is necessary to move beyond the postcolonial theoretical framework in order to adequately understand the empire of English and that the phenomenal success of the Chinese memoirs shows how global capitalism and the demand for linguistic uniformity reinforce each other. In this new phase of “late capitalism,” English serves not only as a tool of various sociopolitical projects such as cultural imperialism, nation-building, or postcolonial resistance, but also as a commodity, a form of capital and power, whether discursive, social, or economic.