Xiaolu Guo and the Contemporary Chinese Anglophone Novel

This chapter examines Xiaolu Guo as a paradigmatic writer of geopolitics, biopolitics, and capitalism in contemporary Chinese Anglophone fiction. The chapter first focuses onA Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Loversto rethink models of Anglophone writing. Against utopian conceptions of English as a privileged language of heterogeneity or hybridity,Dictionaryis analyzed in terms of biocapital and geopolitics, as a narrative of the Chinese migrant’s absorption into the Anglophone publishing industry and the Anglophone empire. The chapter then analyzesUFO in Her Eyesas representative of a recent turn in Chinese fiction toward issues of biocapital, the increasing entanglement of the communist state’s regulation of bodies with its capitalist goals. Unique among biocapitalist fiction, however,UFOfurther situates contemporary China in a global post-9/11 context of state surveillance and defense security. Guo’s novels, then, offer a distinctly instructive framework for comparative reflections on biopolitics, biocapital, and the global security state.