Encountering the other: Identity, culture, and the novel in late imperial China

This dissertation is an examination of the representations of ethnic and foreign others, the so-called cultural other, in late imperial Chinese fictional narrative. Based on the Sinocentric worldview, premodern Chinese cultural discourse of the other was informed by a center-periphery conceptual model, which gave rise to a rhetoric of cultural self-sufficiency and superiority of the self. However, a large number of novels produced in late imperial period feature encounters with other people in borderlands or foreign countries. The very need to go to far-off land and to meet alien peoples betrays not only doubt of self-sufficiency, but also anxieties over self-identity on the part of the educated elite, the arbiter and inscriber of the cultural identity of China. To explore this anxiety, even crisis, of the educated elite articulated in relation to the cultural other is the focus of this study. Based on an interdisciplinary approach informed by theories of cultural anthropology, colonial discourse as well as gender studies, I argue that the other is a cultural construct and it is decided by its positionality and discursivity. With two case studies, Yesou puyan (Humble words of an old rustic) and Jinghua yuan (The destiny of the flower in the mirror), I demonstrate how the Sinocentric worldview is simultaneously asserted and called into question.