The remarkable degree of convergence of Chinese and Western critical discourses over the last three decades makes us all the more aware of continuing differences in their predominant modes of thought. This complex and fascinating issue is tackled head-on by Gloria Davies in her ambitious work Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry.
As her title indicates, Davies takes “patriotic worrying” or youhuan as the common denominator in contemporary Chinese critical thought. This tendency, she argues, colors Sinophone adaptations of Western theory, which undermine the latter's “preference for decidedly nonessentialist, nonfoundationalist, and nonnationalistic formulations” (p. 29). Instead, Chinese critical inquiry replaces discursive self-reflexivity with linguistic certitude and tends to instrumentalize even the most antipositivist Western theory and enlist it in the teleological project of national and cultural perfection.
Davies begins by outlining the problematic of youhuan, contrasting it with the concerns of self-reflexive Euro-American theory and highlighting...