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The book A Cultural Approach to Discourse, is published by the author as one of several works dealing with cultural representations of our world and the people living in it and with discourse as linguistic communication in social, cultural, political and historical contexts. Shi-xu has a personal background that allows him to write about these themes not only from a theoretical point of view, but also from direct experience in his exchange with western universities. He has been Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, Lecturer at the National University of Singapore, and Reader at the University of Ulster. Today he is professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, where he is Director of the Institute of Discourse and Cultural Studies. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Multicultural Discourses (Routledge, UK) and author of several books in this field.
Shi-xu develops his cultural approach to discourse as an interrelated research system, as new ways of thinking and speaking which are motivated by explicit cultural politics. His aim is to overcome a totalising theory of discourse by stressing a cultural, post-colonial perspective. He prefers, rather than methods defined as universal, political-ethnographic studies that are designed to undermine culturally repressive discourses.
In the first two chapters, he outlines the theoretical framework of his new approach, discussing especially the relation between discourse and reality and between discourse and culture. He argues against the notion of linguistic communication as a mirror of reality and underlines “the capacity