E. K. Tan. Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013, xii+260p.

Abstract

Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Identities in the Nanyang Literary World E. K. Tan Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013, xii+260p.In Southeast Asian studies, a gap often exists between social science and humanities scholarship. This divide has arisen due to differing research methodologies, methods, approaches, materials, issues, and perspectives. In this sense, E. K. Tan's Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Identities in the Nanyang Literary World deftly bridges the divide as it copes with an issue, Chineseness, which is a common interest of scholars in both spheres. The underlying critical concept of Sinophone has widened the research horizons of literature and studies, and also been increasingly accepted in fields like comparative literary studies, Southeast Asian studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, anthropology, and sociology. By focusing on two writers from Malaysia and one from Singapore (all who write in different languages), the text juxtaposes influential theories of Chineseness with theories to persuasively negotiate the current value of Chineseness as an identification marker of communities. Using both the and Anglophone literary works and associated cultural practices of these three writers as evidence, Rethinking Chineseness uncovers a identity that is always transitional and open for (re) construction.Sinophone studies place key focus on identities of Chinese-descent communities across the world and related representations of everyday local life experiences. While existing works in the field do respond to such crucial issues to a certain extent, Rethinking Chineseness is comparably outstanding for its substantial combing and correlation of interdisciplinary theories, such as those of Ien Ang, Rey Chow, Allen Chun, Shih Shu-mei, Tu Wei-ming, Wang Gungwu, Wang Ling-chi, Chow Kai-Wing, Tan Chee-Beng, Jing Tsu, Stuart Hall, Aihwa Ong, Donald M. Nonini, Chen Kuanhsing, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. This meticulous study potently justifies its research rationale and repeatedly enhances the conversing space of the studied topic with insights from other fields. Indeed, Rethinking Chineseness astutely weaves a thought-provoking dialogue with the above-mentioned scholars into literary textual and historical contextual analysis to deploy convincing argumentation throughout the book.To Tan, who is basically a literary scholar, literary imaginaries are products of social realities and manifestations of community dialogues with nation-state narratives. In this view, subjects frequently mobilize imaginaries to navigate certain demarcating discourses like the universal hegemony of culture and Chineseness; these imaginaries hence move beyond nationality and ethnicity to differentiate what is and what is not in the historical and social-political milieus of the community. In other words, the writing and deployment of imaginaries is a conscious practice in the cultural politics of identification. It provides a way for subjects and communities to express agency and escape from imposed forms of identification. This dynamic legitimatizes the investigation into the subjects' perception of desires and memories as Chinese or local through analyzing and evaluating their literary imaginaries. With this basic foundation, Rethinking Chineseness extensively examines expressive works like novels, war narratives, and plays to find out how subjects and the following generation of these sojourners reconstruct and articulate their memories, desires, dreams, hopes, and longings when they reinvent their ethnic culture in different stages of migration (p. 38).In chapter 1, Filling in the Blanks: War and the Inscription of a Malayan Identity, Tan scrutinizes Malaysian-born writer Vyvyane Loh's English-language novel, Breaking the Tongue (New York: W. …