| Resumo: | The notion of “ethnic minority literature” is well established in Chinese literary studies. According to the standard definition, ethnic minority literature must be authored by a member of an ethnic minority and must reflect that specific minority’s modes of life. This definition hinges on the analysis of the author’s ethnicity and on the themes of his/her writing, thus ignoring the role of the reader in the process of literary interpretation. To fill this gap, this study asks what makes a text “ethnic” from the perspective of the model reader, the hypothetical person who is the target audience of a literary text. Taking five texts by contemporary Chinese authors as case studies, this article suggests that the content of a literary text— not the author’s ethnicity—determines whether a text is perceived as “ethnic”. For this reason, the article introduces the notion of “literature about ethnic minorities” as a tool of literary analysis that allows foregrounding modes of literary expression such as language use and literary themes rather than ethnic administrative categories.
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