| Summary: | When waking up from the dream of one-world-ness, how do we talk to each other?
Technological development and the hegemonic definition of modernity that emerged from it have been under interrogation for decades. In a diminishingly globalized world, we are prompted to reflect on what our connectedness brought to us. There is a world free to roam for some, but not for all. The transnational corporations export their imagined world of synchrony, although it was also those trades and exchanges in the history that cultivated new imaginations (and sometimes violence). Could it be our sense of entitlement to the “feel-at-home”, the immediacy promised by the newest technologies, and our inability to hear and talk without aided translations, that contribute to a singular world under the name of “international”?
The end of one world marks the emergence of many worlds, seen or unseen.
This thesis is an attempt to respond to those questions of the global imagination and concern through its projection on a contemporary “nation,” China. It starts with the formation of the Han Chinese identity, itself a construct that cannot be reduced to a singular image. The case I write about is the distinct culture of Sichuan, formed by the past millennial influx of immigration. The thesis continues to unravel the complexity of the Chinese language, namely the separation of the oral and the written, the hierarchy of the vernacular oral (dialects) and the official oral (Mandarin), and the transience of the vernacular written. Translation happens on multiple levels, yet through the untranslatability of the unwritten to the written, a culture shaped by locality survives and mutates. The thesis also investigates how technology shapes the Chinese language in the digital age, and how standardization could possibly curb the liveliness of the unwritten or alter its living trajectory. The text ends with a discussion of personal anecdotes, weaving the writing and artistic practices together.
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