UC Santa Barbara

How do Kenneth Pai, Eileen Chang, Ha Jin, and Regina Kanyu Wang reinvent language and culture in the process of transcreating their own source texts? In this dissertation, I investigate the cultural politics and defamiliarizing aesthetics of (self-) translation and transmediation, two literary and transmedial phenomena that underpin intercultural communication worldwide. This project interrogates the ways in which our hypermediated world is constantly re-mediated and re-circulated in orality, film, theater, television, music, and digital media. I use self-translation and (self-)transmediation as tools for re-examining hybrid identity construction in the context of Sinophone creators who navigate between multiple languages, media, and cultures. This project analyzes (self-) translated texts, their transmediated iterations, and the politics of those texts’ circulation beyond their immediate discourse communities. My project is the first to examine longitudinal case studies of multicultural Sinophone writers who practice self-translation, transwriting, and transmediation as organic forms of artistic transcreation. I posit self-translation and transmediation as reparative forces that fuel self-reflection, trauma reconciliation, and intercultural dialogue worldwide. By situating the practice of self-translation within the circumstances of diasporic subjectivity, this project lends textually situated historicization to Sinophone interventions. By examining the ways in which the émigré Sinophone authors Kenneth Pai (Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇, b. 1937), Ha Jin (哈金, pen name for Xuefei Jin 金雪飞, b. 1956), Eileen Chang (张爱玲, b. 1920), and Regina Kanyu Wang (王侃瑜, b. 1990) defamiliarize their own texts and memories through reader-enabled catharsis, I envision self-translation as a trauma reconciliation technology that (re-)inscribes national trauma narratives under individual affective structures, and vice-versa. These authors’ creative processes of self-transmediation, spanning multiple decades, languages, genres, and mediums, reveal self-translation as a hermeneutic process of cultural transcreation that posit source and translated text as a pair of mutually refracting mirrors.Displaced geographically, temporally, and linguistically from their source material, self-translators are uniquely positioned to ferry meanings across diverse languages, mediums, and cultural contexts. I reconceptualize Sinophone literature as encompassing Chinese (Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, and so forth) and Chinglish renderings in oral, written, translated, and transmedial forms, thus positing the Sinophone as a translingual epistemology that rewrites Chineseness from the margins. I propose the Shadow Sinophone framework as encompassing hybrid, multilingual, and transmedial literature, especially countercanonical literature deliberately created in a subversive, deviant, queer, and jarring style. The works I examine democratize language and culture by creating a liminal “transwriting zone” bridging heterogeneous cultures and temporalities. Ultimately, Sinophone self-translators and transcreators enrich and challenge the literary canon from the periphery, forging transwriting zones that intervene in the monoliths of homogenized English and Mandarin globalese.