Siting Postcoloniality

“Collectively refuting the postcolonial as a break from formal colonialism, this volume highlights the shortcomings of postcolonial theory as practiced in a Euro-American context by attending to the specific conditions of Sino East Asia. By charting the usefulness of the postcolonial in various colonial legacies of the Sinosphere, Siting Postcoloniality makes an important contribution to Asian studies and postcolonial studies more broadly. No other book on the topic brings as much theoretical rigor as this volume.” - Leo T. S. Ching, author of Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia

“This mournful, delicate set of essays puts a coda on a question about colonial modernity raised among East Asianists in the early 1990s. Agonistic, even heartbreaking, a tremolo suffuses the collection: what happens after critique? How do the humanities and specifically literary theory address anew gaping geopolitical and ethical wounds? Honest and reflexive, these essays will be welcomed across the cultural theory world.” - Tani E. Barlow, editor of Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia

"Siting Postcoloniality should be most appreciated for its vanguard effort to nuance and update postcolonial theory by unpacking the illuminating relevance of the Sinosphere experiences. Correcting the field’s long-standing geographical bias against Sinitic-influenced regions, the volume brims with insights on fluid subjectivities rooted in the dialectics of coloniality and temporality."

"Overall, this is a strong volume that both augments existing discourses and suggests new possibilities for postcolonial studies across a portion of the Sinosphere. . . . [T]he clarity and quality of writing is, on the whole, excellent, and chapters are either accessible as introductory pieces to specific topics or make clear and compelling intellectual contributions to their relevant fields." - Kyle Shernuk, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

"Peng Cheah and Caroline Hau, together with the other contributors, have successfully worked towards remedying a grave problem within the field of postcolonialism, and they justly point out that East and Southeast Asia have an important and rightful place within this academic field . . . it is an important vantage point for further study, and invaluable to anyone interested in postcolonialism and/or East and Southeast Asia." - Tijs Hopman, IIAS Review

"[A] masterfully curated volume. . . . Together, these essays 'reopen the box' of the postcolonial episteme in several broad ways: by challenging the divide of West and non-West in Said’s Orientalism thesis and examining alternative modalities of colonial power in the Sinosphere; by complicating temporal imaginations of linear progress from subjugation to liberation, showing colonial legacies as palimpsests of overlapping influence; and by creating paths of comparison within the Sinosphere, in which postcolonial conditions in inter-Asian spaces are put into conversation with each other." - Xiaobo Yuan, The Comparatist

"Siting Postcoloniality is a theoretically dazzling volume that reinvigorates the field of post colonial theory by shifting its conceptual referentiality to the East Asian Sinosphere. . . . [It] injects postcolonial theory with new momentum. It successfully overcomes the Eurocentric and Atlantic biases in previous iterations of postcolonialism by showcasing how Sinophone Asian sites encompass both historical agents of imperialism and afterlives of postcolonial formations."
  - Alvin K. Wong, Asian Studies Review

"Postcolonial theory has much to learn from scholars of East and Southeast Asia. . . . Siting Postcoloniality powerfully testifies to the rewards of taking on those cases that may seem to fit poorly with existing theory." - Nicolai Volland, Comparative Literature Studies