Borderspaces in Text and Image: Representing Canada in Chinese Textual Culture (1868-1938)

This dissertation examines the concept of "borderspaces" as productive sites of investigation. Borders are understood as lived spaces---hence, "borderspaces"---inhabited by people and languages. These borderspaces point to intimate connections between the nations of Canada and China that multiply the ways the relationship between the two nations can be imagined beyond the figure of the diasporic immigrant. Most investigations in Sino-Canadian studies emphasize the immigrant community but overlook the lived and mediated experiences of other Chinese individuals who also visited and/or wrote about Canada for Chinese-reading audiences in China at this time. Using Chinese-language travel writings and fiction about Canada, this dissertation considers the discursive linkages between Canada and China produced by Chinese diplomats, officials, overseas students, and translators who represented Canada for audiences in China during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when travel to Canada was becoming increasingly restrictive for ethnic Chinese.;Examining these travel writings and fiction through the lens of minor transnationalism (Lionnet and Shih), which emphasizes the experiences of individuals who grappled with colonial, imperial, and global dominance and control, this dissertation draws attention to minor writings that critique hegemonic and homogenizing narratives of global history. As such, the notion of borderspaces highlights the uneven experiences of ethnic Chinese in North America while simultaneously showcasing the agency of Chinese writers and translators in dealing with issues of representation they confronted as Chinese individuals in the context of North American discrimination.;This dissertation explores four different concepts of borderspaces that produce dissonance against major singular narratives of Chinese oppression in North America. It examines how discriminatory laws, imperial desires, mass migrations, and power imbalances affected Chinese travellers and writers as well as how their writings offer a complicated critique and commentary of China's historical position in the world.;This research thus provides a more nuanced picture of the relationship between Canada and China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by demonstrating that first, multiple vectors (both physical and intangible) connect two nations and that second, these spaces are significant to the project of critical global history.