Landscape of Words

 The chapter argues that the term Sinoglossia risks overestimating the destabilizing potential of marginal expressive forms, if we do not sufficiently account for the mechanisms that keep neutralizing and appropriating them. Hence, this chapter theorizes Sinoglossia as an elastic term entailing the contradictory effects of mediation, as an act of delimitation that both brings meanings to closure and opens them up for rearticulation, and as an approach to the “Sino” that considers both differentiation and fixing as complementary poles in the process of remediation. While “glossia” evokes heterogeneity of languages and centrifugal transformations, “Sino-“ calls attention to centripetal pulls of identification and to the aesthetics and technologies that make identification possible. The chapter probes these claims through an analysis of the uses of the Chinese script in the film Romance on Lushan Mountain (Lushan lian, 1980). Neither “quintessentially Chinese” nor open to infinite interpretations, Chinese writing in this film epitomizes the ways in which the foreign and the marginal are reappropriated to serve a state-supported multicultural vision of Chineseness. If understood as a process of remediation that can bring visibility to the marginal but also expand the scope of the hegemonic, Sinoglossia ultimately serves as a reminder of the reasons why categories such as the nation and national cinema continue to endure.