Off-Center Articulations

Abstract

Recent studies on Singapore Chinese literature have employed analytical lenses such as the Sinophone and postloyalism, which are exogenous to the historical and everyday experiences in the region that produced the texts. This article proposes using the lens of the Chinese-educated to bridge local self-understandings with extralocal modes of interpretation, in order to better illuminate place-specific writing practices. As a salient category of both lived experience and analysis by local researchers, the category of the Chinese-educated occasions a form of “off-center articulation” that maintains strategic distance from Sinophone studies while also enriching the field's conceptual repertoire. Specifically, this analytical perspective highlights how literary representations of social class play a significant role, alongside language and ethnicity, in registering the historical diversity of the Singapore Chinese community. Through examining Singaporean Chinese writer Chia Joo Ming's novel Exile or Pursuit (2015), this article reinterprets the novel's gallery of characters and depictions of interpersonal relations to elicit fading memories of socioeconomic divides and gaps in cultural attainment among ethnic Chinese Singaporeans and their migrant predecessors. It ends by charting future directions for Southeast Asian Chinese literary studies that collectively track a broader locus of “Chinese-educated” literary and cultural practices, and that promote critical inter-referencing within the region.