Review of Unpacking Discourses on Chineseness: The Cultural Politics of Language and Identity in Globalizing China, edited by Shuang Gao and Xuan Wang

Unpacking Discourses on Chineseness is a welcome addition to scholarship in Chinese cultural studies. Interrogating the notion of “Chineseness,” critiquing cultural essentialism, setting out to understand Chineseness in the context of “neoliberal globalization, rising nationalism, persistent Western hegemony and shifting global geopolitics” (3), the editors propose to view the Chinese people, their language, and identity through a “globalizing” lens. Despite this seemingly political starting point, the book is by no means a study of geopolitical China and its role in the current political world. Instead, the book uses sociolinguistic analysis and presents rich empirical information on identity and discourses within and beyond China, unpacking how Chineseness is performed, represented, and contested through varied mediums.