Rhizomatic Chineseness and its postmodern implications for interepistemic translationstudies

Abstract This paper draws on the conception of rhizome in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ([1980] 1987), to (re)define Chineseness as a cultural phenomenon of identification in a postmodern assemblage. The author argues that the postmodern reading of (diasporic) Chineseness is rhizomatic without an authentic arboreal essence. The conclusions will be borne on Douglas Robinson’s theoretical explorations of interepistemic translation between China and the West, based on the premise that transculturation and enculturation can be seen as a process of interepistemic translation with translationality at their core.