All about Fiction: European Global Studies, Chinese Studies and Sinology

Abstract

In this paper, I want to reflect on an appropriate relational understanding of ‘China’ that departs from but avoids the impasses of area studies and that might provide a sound basis for a future Sinology. I first present some recent developments in European studies, in which ‘China’ too (and with it Sinology and Chinese studies) assumes an important, even a constitutive role. My focus will be on my own university’s new program in European Global Studies. If this endeavor is to succeed, it is crucial, I claim, to avoid some longstanding and misguided uses of ‘China’ and other notions as mere fictions of Europe's Other. The contribution that I then want to make involves two points: how to think about a future Sinology that is not inversely and equally problematically relying on these kinds of fictions and how to gain conceptual con- trol of relationality in the attempt to add complexity to the understanding of ‘China’ without having to sacrifice one’s subject-matter and eventually see it dissolve.