Sinophone Southeast Asia

This volume explores the diverse linguistic landscape of Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities. Based on archival research and previously unpublished linguistic fieldwork, it unearths a wide variety of language histories, linguistic practices, and trajectories of words. The localized and often marginalized voices we bring to the spotlight are quickly disappearing in the wake of standardization and homogenization, yet they tell a story that is uniquely Southeast Asian in its rich hybridity. Our comparative scope and focus on language, analysed in tandem with history and culture, adds a refreshing dimension to the broader field of Sino-Southeast Asian Studies.

"Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World is the first book devoted to Sinophone Southeast Asian literature in the English-speaking world. Conceptually innovative and flawlessly written, this book makes an important contribution not only to the emergent and growing field of Sinophone studies, but also to Southeast Asian studies, Chinese studies, comparative literary studies, diaspora studies, and minority and multicultural studies. Anyone interested in questions of identity calibrated through such vectors as language, culture, history, geography, and nationality will find this book to be extremely valuable. This is an impressive accomplishment." - Professor Shu-mei Shih, University of California at Los Angeles "E. K. Tan has done magnificent work in rethinking literary and cultural politics in the context of Sinophone articulations. In Rethinking Chineseness he looks into sources drawn from the Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia, identifies indigenous and diasporic contestations, and teases out the radical elements in the contemporary debate about Chinese identities. Both historically engaged and theoretically provocative, Tan's book is a most important source for anyone interested in Chinese and Sinophone literary and cultural studies." - Professor David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "With his illuminating historical and theoretical mapping of the concepts, from Overseas Chinese to Chinese Diaspora, Chineseness to Sinophone, E.K. Tan has done a brilliant job in this highly challenging, interdisciplinary project by weaving together discourses in various academic fields and providing an integrated cross-referential discussion. His selection of works by Singaporean and Malaysian writers fills in glaring gaps and further contributes to the richness and complexities of the notion of Sinophone literature and culture. It is a definitive basic reference in this field." - Professor Quah Sy Ren, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

"Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World is the first book devoted to Sinophone Southeast Asian literature in the English-speaking world. Conceptually innovative and flawlessly written, this book makes an important contribution not only to the emergent and growing field of Sinophone studies, but also to Southeast Asian studies, Chinese studies, comparative literary studies, diaspora studies, and minority and multicultural studies. Anyone interested in questions of identity calibrated through such vectors as language, culture, history, geography, and nationality will find this book to be extremely valuable. This is an impressive accomplishment." - Professor Shu-mei Shih, University of California at Los Angeles "E. K. Tan has done magnificent work in rethinking literary and cultural politics in the context of Sinophone articulations. In Rethinking Chineseness he looks into sources drawn from the Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia, identifies indigenous and diasporic contestations, and teases out the radical elements in the contemporary debate about Chinese identities. Both historically engaged and theoretically provocative, Tan's book is a most important source for anyone interested in Chinese and Sinophone literary and cultural studies." - Professor David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "With his illuminating historical and theoretical mapping of the concepts, from Overseas Chinese to Chinese Diaspora, Chineseness to Sinophone, E.K. Tan has done a brilliant job in this highly challenging, interdisciplinary project by weaving together discourses in various academic fields and providing an integrated cross-referential discussion. His selection of works by Singaporean and Malaysian writers fills in glaring gaps and further contributes to the richness and complexities of the notion of Sinophone literature and culture. It is a definitive basic reference in this field." - Professor Quah Sy Ren, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.

China's recent economic growth has fed a rapid increase in the study of modern Chinese language and literature globally. In this shifting global context, authors who work on the edges of the literary empire raise important questions about the homogeneity of language, identity and culture that is produced by the modern Chinese literary canon. This book examines a key segment of this literature and asks, "What does it mean to be of Chinese descent and Chinese-speaking outside of China?" While there have been several excellent works that deal with individual Chinese authors from Malaysia, there is to date no broadly framed and comprehensive study of the body of Chinese diasporic literature emerging from this multiethnic, polylinguistic country. This neglect is surprising given the vibrant development of Chinese Malaysian literature.This book fills the gap by looking specifically at how diasporic Chinese subjects make sense of their Chinese and Malaysian identities in postcolonial Malaysia. This book will be of value to scholars and students of Chinese-language literature and culture.It will also appeal to scholars and students in the fields of Chinese and Southeast Asia studies as well as those interested in postcolonial, diaspora, migration, Asian American studies, and world literature.

Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their "New World" and mingling with native cultures. Writing the South Seas explains why Nanyang encounters, neglected by most literary histories, should be considered crucial to the national literatures of China and Southeast Asia.

More than 80 per cent of the Chinese outside China live in Southeast Asia and many of them have been integrated into the local societies. However, the resurgence of China and ethnic Chinese investment in their ancestral land have caused concern among some non-Chinese Southeast Asian elites. They have begun to question the position and identity of the Chinese population in their countries. Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians addresses these ethnic Chinese issues, as well as ethnic Chinese relations with China and with indigenous groups in the region. Written by leading scholars in Southeast Asia, including both ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese, the volume also explores the position of the ethnic Chinese in contemporary as well as the future Southeast Asia, providing readers with a most up-to-date and comprehensive study on the subject.

In a work that will force scholars to re-evaluate how they approach Sinophone studies, Wai-Siam Hee demonstrates that many of the major issues raised by contemporary Sinophone studies were already hotly debated in the popular culture surrounding Chinese-language films made in Singapore and Malaya during the Cold War. Despite the high political stakes, the feature films, propaganda films, newsreels, documentaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other published materials of the time dealt in sophisticated ways with issues some mistakenly believe are only modern concerns. In the process, the book offers an alternative history to the often taken-for-granted versions of film and national history that sanction anything relating to the Malayan Communist Party during the early period of independence in the region as anti-nationalist. Drawing exhaustively on material from Asian, European, and North American archives, the author unfolds the complexities produced by British colonialism and anti-communism, identity struggles of the Chinese Malayans, American anti-communism, and transnational Sinophone cultural interactions. Hee shows how Sinophone multilingualism and the role of the local, in addition to other theoretical problems, were both illustrated and practised in Cold War Sinophone cinema. Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War deftly shows how contemporary Sinophone studies can only move forward by looking backwards. ‘Sound and refreshingly original. Remapping the Sinophone is an important book that will change the ways in which scholars tackle Sinophone studies, and it will exert profound influence on related scholarship published in both the Sinophone and the Anglophone world.’ —Shu-mei Shih, UCLA / The University of Hong Kong ‘Remapping the Sinophone offers a fresh perspective to Sinophone studies by mapping out the relevance of early Chinese-language cinema in Singapore and Malaya to the burgeoning field. Wai-Siam Hee’s examination of this lesser known cultural history in Southeast Asia through the critical lens of the Cold War is a necessary intervention to our understanding of Sinophone Cinema as a pluralistic form.’ —E. K. Tan, SUNY Stony Brook