Transformation through Transculturation in Chen Xi’s Comics

Chen Xi (1981–), aka Long Santiao, is a UK-based transnational cartoonist, writer, and illustrator. With the exception of Under the Sky of Rome (Luoma de tiankong xia), an illustrated novel published in 2009 by Shaanxi Normal University Press, her work consists mainly of comics and graphic novels, some of them collected in a book titled Dreams and Shadows: Tales from Planet Xi’s Teahouse, published in 2015 by the British independent publisher Line of Intent, and others self-published or simply uploaded on her blogs. Since her style—playfully called “Sinophone pop” (Pedone Il favoloso mondo di Chen Xi. Narrazioni pop nell’epoca della fluidità culturale. Presentazione. LEA—Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente 7: 3–17, 2018b)—draws upon different cultural traditions to shape original, fluid meanings, her work can be described as transcultural (Dagnino Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity. Transcultural Studies 2: 130–160, 2013). This occurs through the massive use of scripts and images ascribable to a Chinese cultural context (traditional folklore, wuxia martial heroes, mythology, and fantasy), combined with European ones (Italian writers Buzzati, Calvino, Eco, or atmospheres from Britain’s Victorian era or London’s Swinging Sixties). In a skilfully crafted paradox, Chen Xi employs commodification, fetishization, and self-orientalization to create a personal neo-nomadic, transcultural landscape. Interrogating the hybridity of the graphic novel/illustrated fiction as a genre to challenge the univocity of identity, the chapter also demonstrates that Chen Xi’s work is an act of creative agency to articulate a specific Sinophone chronotope (Shih, The Concept of the Sinophone. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 163 (3), 709–718, 2011), in a continued questioning of the center/periphery matrix that reflects the author’s transformation through active (trans)culturation empowerment.