Between Mobility and Place-making: The Worlds of Southeast Asia in Modern Chinese Literature | 在流动与地方创生之间: 现代华文与华人文学里的东南亚世界

The workshop engages with the globalization turn of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies since the 2000s, in which the Southeast Asian context figures prominently. Contrary to its marginality in many other disciplines, the region — also known by antecedent ethno-geographical appellations such as “Nanyang” (the South Seas) and “Nusantara” (the Other Islands) — has been central to the recent remapping of global Chinese literature. In addition, Southeast Asia has played a crucial but largely unrecognized role in coining meta-concepts to re-frame the study of Chinese cultural areas at critical junctures. For instance, “Cultural China,” the oft-invoked concept in the 1990s to eschew a singular geopolitical and cultural authority embodied by the mainland state, was first proposed by diasporic Malaysian Chinese writers in the 1970s. From the mid-2000s on, the vibrant multi-sited formation of Malaysian Chinese-language literature has invigorated the concept of the Sinophone, formulated to disprivilege China and re-configure center-periphery cultural relations that structure the new cartography of Chinese-language literature. To date scholars have not agreed on the most apposite term to characterize the cultural formations that lie primarily outside mainland China. From “Chinese,” “Sinophone” to “Sino-Southeast Asia,” the plurality of designations underscore the contested interpretations of Sinitic literary practices within and connected to the region.

Keeping in mind the aforementioned invocations, each with their own assumptions and strategic objectives, the ongoing debate can re-visit existing studies on the varied areal constituents of the region. Research has shown that since the 14th century, localities that correspond to current-day Southeast Asia have hosted remarkable histories of vernacularizing Sinitic literary production, which subsequently flourished from the 18th century to early 20th century. From the diversity of Sinitic script practices that inflected literary writings in Vietnam, to the Indonesian depiction of Chinese detectives in translation and original works, to the narratives by Chinese Filipinos that address the variegated condition of Chineseness and its relation to Philippine nationhood, the “language ethics,” “South-South literary exchange” and “strategic hybridity” enacted by social actors exemplify inquiries on civilizational ethos, popular culture and political economy, all of which bear upon the nature and evolution of literary modernities. What accounts for the limited critical attention on these phenomena until the recent spotlight on Malaysian Chinese-language literature (or Mahua literature, as it is locally known), and how can examining the region anew help to reconceptualise the field of modern Chinese literary studies? Besides employing the nation-state as the customary analytical unit, are there alternative scales to study transregional literary production related to places located in today’s Southeast Asia? Historically speaking, how and why have players in fields of cultural production dismantled established creative frameworks and installed new modalities of writing? In particular, the ramifications of overlapping literary traditions in various multilingual societies deserve further critical attention as they can illuminate the uneasy making of modern subjects and their hybrid cultural identities.

Focusing on the topic “Between Mobility and Place-making: The Worlds of Southeast Asia in Modern Chinese Literature,” the workshop will be held in tandem with a second workshop on the same theme at Duke University from March 11-13, 2021. Both events aim to delineate the paradigmatic potential of the geographical region for modern Chinese literary studies, especially in terms of how it can highlight modes of localized Chinese literary and cultural innovations, as well as the ways in which writers have conjugated local self-understandings and extra-local perspectives of linguistic and ethnic relations to the region. The workshops will approach “Chinese literature” in its broadest sense to include Chinese-language writings as well as literature written by ethnic Chinese authors with strong ties to Southeast Asia since the 19th century. They will also be open to parsing “localization” through different optics, by acknowledging the process as either one of absorption of foreign influence, or one engaged in adaptation to new cultural contexts.

The workshop will provide the opportunity for presenters to discuss their articles in progress, which will be reviewed for a special issue at PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature. We anticipate rich and constructive scholarly conversations. The workshop will not be recorded.

WORKSHOP CONVENOR
Dr. CHAN Cheow Thia
Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

Professor Carlos ROJAS
Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University