Sinophone Literature Research Articles

Transnational Chinese literature and Sinopolyphony

Abstract The unprecedented power of China and its cultural expansion are increasing the need to examine its hegemonic impact in the field of literature. The new concept of ‘sinophone’, inspired by postcolonial criticism, reveals vigorous protests against Mainland’s centrality by advocating Chinese Diaspora literature, which has been too long relegated to a peripheral status. This study seeks to reconsider such debates through investigations of historical reasons, ideological issues, and perspectives they have widened. The sinophone literature is thus set up as a creative space, denationalized as well as transnationalized. Denying both the weight of the matrix and the chimerical archipelago, it follows the poetics of relation, the intermixture, and the Open.

Laughter in the Time of Coronavirus: Epidemic Humor and Satire in Chinese Women's Digital Diaries

This paper is a study of humorous and satirical image-texts found in eleven Chinese women’s online diaries composed between 2020 and 2022 during the time of COVID-19, including three from Wuhan, one from Xi’an, two from Chongqing, one from Chengdu, one composed by a Shanghainese, and three by New Yorkers. The diarists’ intersectional positionings as social worker, medical practitioner, interactive designer, unemployed grassroots organizer, overseas student, filmmaker, teacher, journalists, writers, and mothers from different cities in China and the United States inform their individual articulations of concerns about sociopolitical changes, pandemic situations, everyday life, as well as gender and class issues.Epidemic humor and satire in these lockdown narratives will be introduced in light of multidisciplinary methods, including sociological studies, political philosophy, psychological theory, and literary criticism. These feminine expressions of comic feelings point to communal laughter as a strategy for survival, subversion, and nonviolent resistance against unprecedented state surveillance and interventions in everyday life. As Sinophone literature continues to go global together with the spread of the disease, the Chinese diaries tend to be more politically satiric, as seen in Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary and its English, German, and Japanese renditions, while the American–Chinese journals are rather humorous in terms of recording life, such as daily diet and necessities during the quarantine. This is due to cultural and situational differences, yet they have all exhibited their feminine sensitivity and sensibilities and formed a structure of feeling representing popular responses to the official discourse among digital citizens in the time of coronavirus.

Diasporic Identity in Contemporary Sinophone Literature: The Role of Language and Cultural Elements.

Amidst the contemporary diasporic landscape in Sinophone literature, this research critically examines the nexus of language, culture, and identity. The study aims to analyze literary pieces composed in Sinophone languages across diverse diasporic communities and uncover the impact of language and cultural elements on the articulation and comprehension of diasporic identity. This paper used the following. comparative and typological research, an in-depth analysis of three Sinophonic texts, and contextual analysis. The subject of the study was three texts: The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan), Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai Sijie), and The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston). The results showed that In The Joy Luck Club, language and cultural facets unveil the characters' dual identity struggles due to living abroad, exemplified through code-switching's psychological tension. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress utilizes language and cultural details to underscore the significance of preserving heritage within the diaspora, with literary allusions amplifying this endeavor. In The Woman Warrior, language and cultural elements reflect the heroine's inner conflict as she navigates her dual cultural allegiance. This scholarly revelation deepens comprehension of how these aspects influence identity formation in the diaspora. These findings broaden the understanding of Sinophone diasporic literature, spotlighting shared trends in identity portrayal through language and culture. The research has theoretical value for literary, cultural, and anthropological studies and practical significance, potentially informing educational initiatives on diasporic literature and cultural diversity. This study's outcomes hold relevance for students, researchers, and cultural scholars exploring the role of language and culture in diasporic identity expression.

Reconfiguration and representation in the literary landscape: Chinese-language literary production in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article is a case study of the production of Chinese-language literature in Singapore, with reference to the nation’s literary demography, to show how it is being reconfigured in the Chinese diaspora. It argues that the Chinese literary tradition can be studied by appropriating ideas from world literature and Sinophone literature for a better understanding of positioning of writers and their works. Empirically the article provides a sociological perspective on award-winning books and major magazines. It defines Singapore’s current literary demography as comprising three groups within the Chinese diaspora: Singapore Chinese who have sunk roots locally over generations; ethnic Chinese who moved from Malaysia; and Chinese immigrants who arrived recently from China. It suggests that within national boundaries, the locally born Singaporean Chinese writers have acquired the greatest local resources and recognition, while their counterparts from Malaysia and mainland China have made a significant impact with less-than-substantial material benefits.

South as a Sight ‘南方’, from a branch to a necessity to World Literature

In the discussion and debates on the world literature system, methodologies and methods is a topic that is valued. Moretti and Apter have prominent different opinions on the adoption of digital or abstract data outside texts and contexts. The way Moretti views the world literature system is highly based on historiography and studies of the Annual School’s influence and Immanuel Wallerstein’s World System, so the western-centric academic genes were inherited to some degree. However, the world system inspired Chinese Characters writing worlds and help form Sinophone Literature, which gives a possible response to Apter’s questioning. Among the system, ‘South’ or South Sight is a different way to deal with intercultural contexts. The article attempts to explain where the dialogue may happen and its reason from other academic traditions. Furthermore, try to methodize the South Sight as a supplement to the world literature approach.

Fluid Horizons

Abstract This article revisits Sinophone literature from the archipelagic region of the western Pacific to understand how thinking with and through the ocean shapes patterns of place-making and identity formation. Scrutinizing stories by Syaman Rapongan and Ng Kim Chew, the article shows how the ocean figures on several distinct registers: as the locale where these works unfold, as the object toward which their characters' yearnings and reflections are directed, and as a condition of being. Alternatively, the ocean can be read in the metaphorical and allegorical sense, as a device that allows their authors to critique (neo)colonial violence, the irruption of modernity, and especially the rigors of land-based and supposedly stable epistemologies. Against these, Rapongan and Ng posit what I call oceanic epistemologies, that is, systems and methods of knowledge drawn from and intertwined with the ocean as a condition of being on a terraqueous globe. The oceanic epistemologies in Sinophone literatures from littoral East and Southeast Asia allow us to rethink fundamental questions of being, identity, and history. They build upon, but methodologically move beyond, the critical apparatus offered by Sinophone literature.

Between Colonialism and Despotism

Abstract The Mengjiang 蒙疆 puppet regime was established in Inner Mongolia by Japanese colonizers, in collaboration with the Mongolian Prince Demchugdongrub, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Mengjiang regime tried to revive Mongolian culture in the name of resisting Chinese despotism. However, the Japanese supported the Mongols' desire for “self-determination” merely to use it as a vehicle for their colonial designs. Through a close reading of several texts that appeared in Sinophone magazines published in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia during the war, this article explicates the distinctions between Han writers' and Mongol intellectuals' nationalist writings, in order to theorize the dual oppression of the Mongol minority culture under Japanese colonialism and Chinese despotism. Despite the mission of this so-called Mongolian nation-state to write in a Mongolian style, the Han writers in Mengjiang expressed their ethnic identity through Sinophone literature; at the same time, Sinicized Mongol intellectuals failed to revive Mongolian culture through the same vehicle. In the end, both the former Han despots and the new Japanese colonizers tried to instrumentalize Mongol minority culture to establish their own cultural hegemony. Under this dual oppression of foreign colonialism and native despotism, the Sinophone nationalist writings of the Han majority and the Mongol minority problematize any simple binarism of colonizer and colonized.

말레이시아 화인화문 시문학의 트랜스내셔널리즘과 문화적 정체성 연구

This paper studied the transnationalism and cultural identity through the development of the Overseas Chinese poetry in Malaysia. In Malaysia, the Overseas Chinese formed a single ethnic group and developed the cultural identity of the Overseas Chinese in a multiracial and multicultural society. In this paper, I studied the transnationalism and cultural identity that appeared in their poems, focusing on the works of 20th-century Overseas Chinese poetry in Malaysia. Through these studies, it is possible to understand the poetry world of Southeast Asia’s Overseas Chinese and to form a unique collective and cultural consciousness through the sinophone literature of Overseas Chinese.<BR> This article mainly considered the works of leading Malaysia’s Overseas Chinese writers Liu-si, Wen-renping, Wen-ruian, Wu-an, and Tian-si. By examining their world of poetry, one could understand the ethnic diversity and homogeneity of Overseas Chinese included in their world of poetry. In particular, in their poetry literature, the identification, ethnic and cultural identities of the Overseas Chinese are emerging. Homesickness about China, Taiwan, and hometown were expressed. And imaginative features of the transnational and ethnic group emerged. Thus, since the 20th century, they have moved to Malaysia, settled down, established their world of poetry, and developed Malaysia

말레이시아 화인화문 시문학의 트랜스내셔널리즘과 문화적 정체성 연구

This paper studied the transnationalism and cultural identity through the development of the Overseas Chinese poetry in Malaysia. In Malaysia, the Overseas Chinese formed a single ethnic group and developed the cultural identity of the Overseas Chinese in a multiracial and multicultural society. In this paper, I studied the transnationalism and cultural identity that appeared in their poems, focusing on the works of 20th-century Overseas Chinese poetry in Malaysia. Through these studies, it is possible to understand the poetry world of Southeast Asia’s Overseas Chinese and to form a unique collective and cultural consciousness through the sinophone literature of Overseas Chinese.<BR> This article mainly considered the works of leading Malaysia’s Overseas Chinese writers Liu-si, Wen-renping, Wen-ruian, Wu-an, and Tian-si. By examining their world of poetry, one could understand the ethnic diversity and homogeneity of Overseas Chinese included in their world of poetry. In particular, in their poetry literature, the identification, ethnic and cultural identities of the Overseas Chinese are emerging. Homesickness about China, Taiwan, and hometown were expressed. And imaginative features of the transnational and ethnic group emerged. Thus, since the 20th century, they have moved to Malaysia, settled down, established their world of poetry, and developed Malaysia

A Surplus of Fish: Language, Literature, and Cultural Ecologies in Ng Kim Chew’s Fiction

Abstract This essay uses an examination of intertwined thematics of fish and text in the fiction of the ethnically Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew in order to reflect on a broader set of ecological concerns, including issues relating to the natural ecology of the Southeast Asian regions depicted in Ng’s works, together with the overlapping literary ecosystems within which his works are embedded. In particular, the essay is concerned with the ways in which Ng’s fiction reflects on the relationship between the field of Southeast Asian Sinophone literature and the partially overlapping ecosystem of world literature.

An outline for a history of emotion of the Chinese in Thailand

ABSTRACT This article attempts to cast the history of the Chinese in Thailand into a new light by framing it within the realm of emotion. Through writing the history of the Chinese from this new perspective and utilizing media such as newspapers, films, novels, etc., loaded with Chinese emotional expression towards the Thai state, society, and self as evidence reflecting emotional lives of the Chinese, we provide a preliminary outline to a history of emotions of the Chinese in Thailand. We argue that, in pursuing the assimilation of the Chinese into Thai society, the Thai state constructed an emotional regime based on the feeling of shame to govern the Chinese. The Chinese, however, found emotional refuge and liberation from the regime in transnational Chinese media and Thai-ified Sinophone literature, which played a significant role in identity politics of Chinese self-identification as neither Thai nor Chinese, but Chinese of Thailand.

When Literary Relations End

Abstract Of the existing approaches to engaging with world literature, Pascale Casanova’s contribution remains the most prescient and relevant to the contemporary world. In this paper, I examine Casanova’s legacy in the context of contemporary Chinese literature – not only as the Sinophone, Chinese, or diasporic, but also in terms of the diverse genrification and creation of new types of media for literary inscription that border on obliterating the primacy of literary aesthetics. Is this a threat to the literary establishment, as it has been practiced, critiqued, and known in the European lineage? I argue that the literary space has never been in starker contrast with the world space, and that the emergence of a different “world normal” is challenging and fortifying Casanova’s legacy in deeply profound ways. To be examined, among others, are recent debates over world and Sinophone literature, science fiction, internet fiction, and diasporic writings.

Research on the Beginnings of Cambodian Sinophone Literature

Abstract Based on research done in the National Archives of Cambodia on the Sino-Cambodian newspaper Mekong Yat Pao and its literary supplements, this report has two main objectives: firstly, since the field of Sinophone literature in the Cambodian Kingdom has seldom been researched, to write a general introduction to the history of the newspaper and its historical context; and then to describe in detail the contents of the literary supplements, trying to understand their development according to a periodization through which one can follow the evolution of the dominant literary genres and the parallel political events of the 1950–60s in Cambodia and mainland China.

“From Postcolonial Literature to World Literature”

Abstract Starting with an analysis of the award-winning literary documentary Le Moulin, this paper argues that the film’s reconstruction of Le Moulin Poetry Society in colonial Taiwan suggests world literature as an alternative framework for studying Taiwan literature within cross-cultural contexts. Taiwan literature has been predominantly studied as “postcolonial literature” vis-à-vis Japanese literature and, more recently, “Sinophone literature” in relation to mainland Chinese literature. Instead of deliberating on the subjugated position of Taiwan literature in relation to dominant literatures, the documentary film celebrates the avant-garde experimentation by Le Moulin Poetry Society and underscores the connection of Taiwan literature to world literature through the mediation of Japanese writers. Its employment of what can be called “performative historiography” to fulfill this task raises significant questions about the reinvention of literature, literary canonization, and literary historiography in a new age.

“Republic of Southern Sinophone Literature” and Its Memorandum

Abstract This essay reexamines two Sinophone literary uchronias, i.e. Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) author Ng Kim Chew’s dystopian account of the People’s Republic of Nanyang, and Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung’s fabrication of the history of a disappeared street in Hong Kong. As representative pieces of Sinophone literature, these two literary uchronias not only rewrite the authors’ local histories but also bring together a critical examination of the geo-political conditions in the Sinophone sphere. Reflecting on the spatialized and materialist models of world literature studies, this essay aims to investigate the Hong Kong-Mahua link in terms of their world-making power.

The Yellow Peril as a Travelling Discourse: A Comparative Study of Wang Lixiong's China Tidal Wave

Joining recent scholarly efforts to free the study of the Yellow Peril from the conventional framework of Asian American and postcolonial studies, this paper offers a comparative analysis of the manifestations of this mutable racial discourse in twentieth-century Anglophone and Sinophone literatures. As a case in point, I focus on the Chinese dissident writer Wang Lixiong and his ‘racist’ appropriation of the Yellow Peril ideology in fin-de-siècle Anglo-American popular writings. By juxtaposing his canonical work China Tidal Wave, known in Chinese as Huang Huo (‘Yellow Peril’), with the Asian invasion fictions by Jack London and M. P. Shiel, I argue that instead of some kind of indisputable metaphysical truth, the Yellow Peril ideology manifested in these texts is merely a performative cultural practice that shifts its functions and allegiances according to the situated socio-political agenda of its practitioner. This performative nature is made explicit through my analyses of the changes of their paratexts as these texts travel across languages, leading to further reflections on theoretical concepts such as Occidentalism, the postcolonial palimpsest, Sinophone literature, and world literature.

Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature by Brian Bernards

Reviewed by: Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature by Brian Bernards Kien Ket Lim Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature by Brian Bernards. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 270. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. This is the third book-length study, after E. K. Tan's Rethinking Chineseness and Alison M. Groppe's Sinophone Malaysian Literature, to tackle the writings in Chinese from Southeast Asia, especially from Malaysia and Singapore.1 Bernards's scope, it seems to me, is more ambitious. Whereas Tan's book limits itself to the 1965–2013 period and Groppe's to authors in one nation-state, Bernards's Writing the South Seas adopts a bird's-eye view over a grand narrative that finds its genesis in Republican China. The life and work of a handful of southbound New Literature (xin wenxue 新文學) luminaries—Xu Dishan 許地山, Lao She 老舍, and Yu Dafu 郁達夫—are laid out in a series of refined vignettes in chapters 1 and 2. In the 1960s, we find homegrown sinophone fiction writers of Malaysia migrating up north to Taiwan, including Li Yongping 李永平, Pan Yu Tong 潘雨桐, and Chang Kuei-hsing 張貴興 (chapter 4). We also see Ng Kim Chew 黃錦樹, who entered the literary scene in the late 1980s (chapter 3). Next, Bernards considers writers who stay close to their homestead, such as Singapore's sinophone authors Yeng Pway Ngon 英培安 and Chia Joo Ming 謝裕民, as well as anglophone novelist Suchen Christine Lim. All three authors see their island republic's policy of racialization as an eyesore (chapter 5). Finally, in chapter 6, readers find a "success story" of integration, that of the sinophone Thai writer Fang Siruo 方思若 (Phonlachet Kitaworanat), whose case represents a permanent state of irreversible creolization. Nanyang 南洋, or "South Seas," is an age-old poetic idiom in Chinese for Southeast Asia. This locale, which is under scrutiny in this book, must be understood as a place of many nations where Chinese is not the state language. Even in Singapore, where Chinese is a state language, anglophone culture dominates. To survive in Nanyang, then, [End Page 286] sinophone authors go about their daily routines as polyglots, but in their writing, they consciously choose Chinese. They often lie low, because they are fully aware that the Chinese spoken by the Nanyang sinophone community is a tongue without an army or a navy behind it. When a language is left to itself, semi-stateless almost, creolization becomes its fate. It is on this inadvertent trend that Bernards's presentation is predicated: he traces how creolization is mobilized, willfully or not, by sinophone writers to confront the official racialization policy at home, a policy practiced long ago by the colonial lords. This historical backdrop explains why Bernards prefers "the Nanyang (a maritime Sinophone concept foregrounding creolization)" over "Southeast Asia (a Western imperial projection)" to be the geographical term he employs (p. 196). Taking creolization as his core idea, Bernards echoes Tan's effort of "rethinking Chineseness." This idea, in turn, is indebted to Shu-Mei Shih's view on the Sinophone to disperse the purist myth of "Chineseness."2 But Bernards goes one step further: he takes pains to paint the political backdrop against which the sinophone literary imagination in Nanyang is produced. As a result, he is faced with literary migrations that go both ways. One migratory trend goes southbound from China in the prewar years, as I noted earlier; the other goes subsequently northward, resinicizing the Chinese Malaysians. Bernards's finding contradicts Shih's view that the sinophone literature can never be diasporic.3 Perhaps it contradicts Tan's also in that Chineseness gets reinstated in the migratory process despite creolization. Bernards's endeavor complicates the modern Chinese writing scene (the New Literature especially) in a refreshing manner. This field of study has long been confined to events in areas known as "Greater China." To include the South Seas as part of this scene does not imply that the area belongs to China but brings forward a vital part of this scene that has been left out of sight. Most students of modern Chinese literature today largely...

Minority Literature, Performativity, Resistance: The Case of Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian Writings

This essay demonstrates how non-Malay language writers in Malaysia attempt to subvert the state’s promotion of a single-language (Malay) literature as national literature through the practice of authorial insularity, which is writing within one’s religio-ethnic community. In the case of sinophone literature, this practice has the added significance of refusing submission to a literary heritage (Chinese) that is fundamentally foreign to its cultural identity. The works of Malaysian anglophone writers such as Salleh ben Joned, Che Husna Azhari and K.S. Maniam, as well as Malaysian-born sinophone writer, Ng Kim Chew, will be discussed to illustrate my overarching point.

Guanxi or What is the Chinese for Relational Theory of World Politics

The phenomenon of China’s rise has urged some to look for International Relations (IR) theories with ‘Chinese characteristics’. A number of these have been associated with the ‘relational turn’. Yet, attempts to bring the Anglophone and the Sinophone strands of the relational turn have failed to transcend the bifurcating metanarrative of the mainstream. To rectify this trend, the analysis engages the literatures on guanxi, the relational turn, and Chinese IR and develops a normative claim about the underlying relationality of knowledge production in post-Western IR. The contention is: (i) that the criticism of substantialism offered by the Anglophone literature on the relational turn fails to overcome its Eurocentrism; (ii) that by subscribing to the epistemic duality of the West vs. the non-West, the Sinophone literature has aborted the political promise of the concept of guanxi. The study deploys guanxi to amplify the intrinsic relationality both of global life and the realms of IR.

“Tell My Mother I’m Sorry”: On Chinese as a Minor Discourse

Taking its inspiration from a line in Chinese that appears in an episode of the popular US television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this essay reflects on the broader phenomenon of minor or minoritized discourses and, specifically, insofar as it relates to modern Chinese literature. The focus, however, is not on discursive formations positioned at the margins of what might be regarded as mainstream Chinese literature (such as ethnic minority literature, Sinophone literature, and so forth), but rather on works by authors who may be viewed as paradigmatically canonical.