East Asian Francophone Writers and Racialized Aesthetics? Gao Xingjian and Aki Shimazaki

East Asian francophone writers form an important emerging body of literature that goes beyond the postcolonial francophonie and poses questions about interpretive approaches to migrant writers of minority ethnicities. This article takes as case studies the Chinese-French writer Gao Xingjian and the Japanese-Québecois writer Aki Shimazaki, and explores the connection between aesthetics and the question of race in their works. By focusing on the notion of universality in Gao’s ‘la littérature froide’ and Shimazaki’s pentalogy Le poids des secrets, the article argues that the two writers’ transcultural aesthetics is a site of tension between universalizing interpretations that transcend race and cultural specificity and racializing views that relativize the meaning of universality.