Translating identity: English language travel discourse on China, 1976--present.

摘要

This project consists of a comparative study of the English-language travel discourse on China after 1976, when both Western society and Chinese society have undergone major changes. With China opening up to the world in the late 1970s, an increasing number of foreign visitors have visited China. Among them were diplomats, tourists, teachers, students, businessmen, journalists, or filmmakers. It is the purpose of this project to explore how identity, both personal and collective, Western and Chinese, has been translated, interpreted, and transformed in the travel writings and films on China after 1976 and how these translations of identity have served as a yardstick of social changes in both societies.;In this project travel is defined in its broadest sense, including the movement from one place to another, both physically and imaginatively. The distinction has been traditionally a thin one. Travel discourse is the recording of these experiences in its all possible forms: words, pictures, and movies. Travel discourse, in recent cultural studies, is treated more as a theoretical site than as a genre. It is a "contact zone", "space of transulturation" (Pratt), "a space in-between" (Bhabha), and a translation term for comparative cultural studies (Clifford). In this project, travel discourse is seen as a site for translating identity. We construct identity by defining ourselves in relation to an array of people and objects not part of ourselves. Travel is a site for encountering difference and travel discourse is critical in developing a sense of identity and representing identities of other cultures. To travel is to encounter difference through familiarity, and experience an inner journey by way of the outer journey. In this sense, travel is an act of translation, a major trope in this study that refers to the traveler's rendering and representation of a cultural and a people other than his/her own.;There are four layers of translations taking place simultaneously in cross-cultural travel discourse: translation of foreign landscapes and communities by travelers, translation of travelers' self identities in terms of their interpretations of a foreign culture, translation of travelers' identities by the locals, and translation of self identities by locals themselves. These four translations are always interrelated, interactive, and mutually defining. The first layer of translating is to bridge the different with the familiar, second the inner with the outer, third the global with the local, last contemporary with the traditional or vice versa.;Embedded in contemporary sensibilities, translating a culture is not only poetic and aesthetic but also geopolitical and socio-economical. It is in this process that individual and national identities are questioned, negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed in relation to modernity. It is a "contact zone" that complicates binary opposites such as self/other, individual/collective, difference/sameness, and time/space.