Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966707
Ko Chia-Cian, Sun Pingyu
As a Chinese-medium educational institution, Chung Ling High School (CLHS) in Penang enjoyed an illustrious reputation in the Malayan era. During the fall of Penang in World War II, the deaths of eight teachers and forty-six students from CLHS marked a painful episode in the history of Penang's intellectual community, manifested in their sense of trauma and reflections on the crisis of Chinese education. After CLHS was reopened during the postwar period, the school set up a committee to commemorate the sacrifices of its teachers and students through memorial services, erection of a monument, and publication of tribute books. Applying the theories of French historian Pierre Nora, this article discusses how the ensuing les lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) formed through the sacrifices of CLHS teachers and students, inscribing the plight of literary lineage and cultural severance, which in turn takes on the role of reviving and perpetuating the ethnic Chinese spirit. In this sense, the sacrifices of the CLHS teachers and students as “sites of memory” have become a part of the ethnic community's collective memory. When we examine how war memory texts are constructed, the CLHS tragedy embeds the connections between Chinese education and the ethnic sentiments of the Chinese community during the Japanese occupation.
槟城崇灵中学作为一所华文教育机构，在马来亚时代享有盛誉。在第二次世界大战槟城沦陷期间，八名教师和四十六名学生的死亡标志着槟城知识界历史上的一段痛苦的篇章，表现在他们的创伤感和对华文教育危机的反思。CLHS在战后重新开放后，学校成立了纪念委员会，通过追悼仪式，建立纪念碑，出版纪念书籍来纪念牺牲的教师和学生。本文运用法国历史学家皮埃尔·诺拉(Pierre Nora)的理论，探讨了中高师生的牺牲如何形成了随后的les lieux de m moire (sites of memory)，记录了文学谱系和文化断裂的困境，从而发挥了复兴和延续中华民族精神的作用。从这个意义上说，作为“记忆场所”的中教师生的牺牲，已经成为民族社区集体记忆的一部分。当我们审视战争记忆文本是如何建构的时候，CLHS悲剧嵌入了中国教育与日本占领时期华人社区的民族情感之间的联系。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966737
C. Rojas
This article borrows Juno Salazar Parreñas's concept of the “semi-wild” as an entry point into an analysis of Malaysian Chinese author Zhang Guixing's novels Elephant Herd (1998) and Monkey Cup (2000). Set in Sarawak, both works feature a relatively simple plotline interwoven with an intricate web of flashbacks. More specifically, each work's primary plotline features an ethnically Chinese protagonist searching for a relative who has disappeared into the rainforest, while also becoming romantically interested in a young Indigenous woman whom he meets during his quest. In each case, a fascination with the relationship between humans and Sarawak's various “semi-wild” flora and fauna is paralleled by an attention to the relationship between the region's ethnic Chinese and its various Indigenous peoples—and particularly two subgroups of Sarawak's Dayak ethnicity, the “Sea Dayaks” (also known as the Iban) and the “Land Dayaks” (who are often simply called “Dayaks”). Each work uses a set of quasi-anthropomorphized plants and animals (including silk-cotton trees, Nepenthes pitcher plants, elephants, crocodiles, rhinoceroses, and orangutans) to reflect on humans' relationship to the local ecosystem, while simultaneously using Indigenous peoples to reflect on the way in which overlapping colonial legacies have shaped the region's sociopolitical structures.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966747
T. Hoogervorst
Batavia, the capital of the former Netherlands Indies, was home to a popular Chinese-run printing industry that published works in the Malay vernacular. Two 1920s Sino-Malay poems reveal firsthand accounts of the city's vibrant sociocultural landscape. Sair park (The Poem of the Park) narrates everyday life at the parks of the colonial metropole, including the opportunities these urban spaces provide for illicit encounters between men and women. Pantoen tjapgome (The Quatrain of the Lantern Festival) describes the festivities of an important holiday that increasingly drifted away from its religious origins and became a public spectacle attended by people from different ethnicities. Together, these poems provide intricate and otherwise unavailable details of everyday life in late-colonial Java. They also reveal some of the anxieties faced by its Chinese-descended population, including the specter of cultural loss and unwarranted interaction between young people from different genders and racial backgrounds. Yet despite this apparent rejection of an Indies-style hybrid modernity, an examination of the language of these poems—Batavia Malay with a substantial influence from Hokkien, the Sinitic variety historically spoken by many Chinese-Indonesian families—demonstrates that they are best approached as examples of Chinese-Indonesian acculturation.
巴达维亚是前荷属印度群岛的首都，是华人经营的印刷业的所在地，该印刷业用马来语出版作品。两首20世纪20年代的华人马来诗歌揭示了这座城市充满活力的社会文化景观的第一手资料。Sair park (The Poem of The park)讲述了殖民大都会公园的日常生活，包括这些城市空间为男女之间的非法相遇提供的机会。《灯节的四行诗》描述了一个重要节日的庆祝活动，这个节日逐渐远离了它的宗教起源，成为了一个由不同种族的人参加的公共场合。总之，这些诗歌提供了爪哇殖民后期日常生活中错综复杂的细节。它们还揭示了华裔人口所面临的一些焦虑，包括对文化流失的恐惧，以及不同性别和种族背景的年轻人之间不必要的互动。然而，尽管这些诗歌明显拒绝印度风格的混合现代性，但对这些诗歌语言的考察——巴达维亚马来语受到闽南语的重大影响，闽南语是许多中国-印度尼西亚家庭历史上使用的汉语变体——表明，它们是中国-印度尼西亚文化适应的最好例子。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966647
D. Wang
This essay seeks to reconsider the current paradigm of Sinophone studies, which is largely based on theories from postcolonialism to empire critique. While Sinophone studies derives its critical thrust from confronting China as a hegemonic force, some approaches have taken a path verging on Sinophobia, the reverse of Sinocentrism. Implied in the argument is a dualistic mapping of geopolitics such as assimilation versus diaspora, resistance versus hegemony, theory versus history, and Sinophone relationality versus China.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966667
Nicholas Y. H. Wong
This article proposes resource extraction politics as a lens to analyze the relationship between Malaysian Chinese (or Mahua) literature and the global literary economy. Rather than ascribe Mahua literature to its present national boundaries and diasporic communities, the article locates its formation in inter-imperial nodes of trafficked labor and art production, as well as a global system of colonial plantations. The article revisits Zeng Huading's 曾華丁 (1906–1942) short story (1928) and Ba Ren's 巴人 (1901–1972) historical drama (1949) about the myth of five Chinese coolies and their execution in 1871 for murdering a Dutch foreman in a Deli tobacco plantation in East Sumatra. The Anglo-Dutch migration corridor, or the cross-straits coolie trade between the two imperial jurisdictions of Penang (Straits Settlements) and Medan (East Sumatra), now part of Malaysia and Indonesia respectively, was one Nanyang connection, but these writers have been discussed separately within Mahua and Yinhua 印華 (Indonesian Chinese) contexts. Ba Ren, in particular, is studied as a leftist writer who contributed artistically to the Indonesian and Chinese revolutions in the 1940s and 1950s. Here, the article rethinks Ba Ren's legacy within a Mahua corpus, and Zeng Huading's fiction within a cross-straits history of labor. This ecological reading of their works also highlights their critique of Mahua's peripheralization within a world economy and global literature.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966727
Boon Eng Khor
Since independence, the ethnic Chinese community in Malaysia has lamented its marginalization by the Malay-Bumiputra elite, a theme that is often reflected in writings by ethnically Chinese Malaysian authors. This article, however, examines how ethnic Chinese authors depict other ethnic minorities, focusing on four approaches to forging counter-discourses used in the literary representation of minorities: binary opposition, rhetorical questions, paradoxical statements, and bystander narration. The discussion of each narrative strategy is supported by examples from works by writers from different eras, regions, genders, and generations. These modes of counter-discourse foreground minority voices and create a meaningful dialogue between the Sinophone community and other ethnic groups. Through these counter-discursive explorations, Mahua authors portray the Chinese in Malaysia in relation to other ethnic minorities. In some cases, we can also observe how Mahua authors employ this counter-discourse structure as a form of resistance against hegemonic state power.
{"title":"Counter-discourse","authors":"Boon Eng Khor","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9966727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9966727","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Since independence, the ethnic Chinese community in Malaysia has lamented its marginalization by the Malay-Bumiputra elite, a theme that is often reflected in writings by ethnically Chinese Malaysian authors. This article, however, examines how ethnic Chinese authors depict other ethnic minorities, focusing on four approaches to forging counter-discourses used in the literary representation of minorities: binary opposition, rhetorical questions, paradoxical statements, and bystander narration. The discussion of each narrative strategy is supported by examples from works by writers from different eras, regions, genders, and generations. These modes of counter-discourse foreground minority voices and create a meaningful dialogue between the Sinophone community and other ethnic groups. Through these counter-discursive explorations, Mahua authors portray the Chinese in Malaysia in relation to other ethnic minorities. In some cases, we can also observe how Mahua authors employ this counter-discourse structure as a form of resistance against hegemonic state power.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90671434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966657
Shuang Shen
This article addresses the neglect toward popular literary networks with Hong Kong in the Cold War period by influential Mahua scholars. Aiming to make way for a more robust discourse of cultural politics in tandem with a regional conceptualization of Sinophone cultural production, the article proposes to understand popular forms such as romance fiction as arising from and coconstituting a regional Sinosphere that can only be understood, following Laura Doyle's recent study, as inter-imperial. Offering a reading of the Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang's romantic fiction and immigrant stories, I show how the stories signify a geopolitical reckoning with the Cold War patterning of the world. This perspective offers more ways for us to evaluate how the regional literary field intersected with the Cold War beyond the singular defense of its “literariness.”
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966757
Josh Stenberg
Hei Ying 黑嬰 (1915–1992) wrote prolifically about the “southern isles,” where he—a Hakka from Sumatra—was born. Written for a sophisticated urban readership in China that was curious about the exotic and erotic Nanyang, Hei Ying's 1930s fiction foregrounds questions of Chinese ethnicity and nation. Ethnicity interacts with gender against sultry and desultory backgrounds, with improper patriotic or sexual tendencies attracting narrative punishment. Drawing on three pieces of his short fiction from the 1930s, this article argues that Hei Ying's theme of sexual temptation in the tropics rehearses European colonial (or Han majority) views of the impulsive, sultry native, an image that is contrasted with Republican Chinese primness. The bourgeois woman awakening to Chinese ethnonationalism and rejecting sensuality in favor of patriotism makes her an ancestor to the sexless heroines of Chinese revolutionary culture, including some Hei Ying would write later. The sensuality of the tropics thus operates as a foil for passions correctly channeled—toward nation (and eventually also party-state).
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966697
Brian Bernards
Starting in the 1970s, flash fiction developed into an outsized literary practice relative to other Sinophone forms in Singapore. Flash fiction's smallness and brevity cohere with the fast pace of urban Singaporean life and transformation of its cityscape, the compartmentalized relationship between the nation's four official languages, the marginality of literary spaces and challenges to maintaining literature as a profession, and Southeast Asia's relative obscurity as a world literary center (with Singapore as a small but important connective hub). Taking Yeng Pway Ngon's fleeting scene of Speakers' Corner (a flash platform of “gestural politics”) as a point of departure, this article charts a short history of Sinophone flash and its relationship to literary community building in Singapore through integrative readings of representative works by Jun Yinglü, Ai Yu, Wong Meng Voon, Xi Ni Er, and Wu Yeow Chong, recognizing their formal and thematic intersections not as “big ideas in tiny spaces” but as iridescent corners that traverse the state's cultural, political, and geographical out-of-bounds (OB) markers. Rather than privileging professional mastery, their works trace flash fiction's iridescent literariness and worldliness to hyperlocality (the physical and literary “corners” they illuminate), compressed temporality, a participatory culture of authorship, and a spirit of amateurism. This amateurism is derived not from a sense of linguistic underdevelopment or technical lack among these authors, but from their passionate and vulnerable engagement with the flash form, as well as the dissident moral conscience of their thematically and stylistically intersecting critiques of Singapore's sociopolitical OB markers.
{"title":"Iridescent Corners","authors":"Brian Bernards","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9966697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9966697","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Starting in the 1970s, flash fiction developed into an outsized literary practice relative to other Sinophone forms in Singapore. Flash fiction's smallness and brevity cohere with the fast pace of urban Singaporean life and transformation of its cityscape, the compartmentalized relationship between the nation's four official languages, the marginality of literary spaces and challenges to maintaining literature as a profession, and Southeast Asia's relative obscurity as a world literary center (with Singapore as a small but important connective hub). Taking Yeng Pway Ngon's fleeting scene of Speakers' Corner (a flash platform of “gestural politics”) as a point of departure, this article charts a short history of Sinophone flash and its relationship to literary community building in Singapore through integrative readings of representative works by Jun Yinglü, Ai Yu, Wong Meng Voon, Xi Ni Er, and Wu Yeow Chong, recognizing their formal and thematic intersections not as “big ideas in tiny spaces” but as iridescent corners that traverse the state's cultural, political, and geographical out-of-bounds (OB) markers. Rather than privileging professional mastery, their works trace flash fiction's iridescent literariness and worldliness to hyperlocality (the physical and literary “corners” they illuminate), compressed temporality, a participatory culture of authorship, and a spirit of amateurism. This amateurism is derived not from a sense of linguistic underdevelopment or technical lack among these authors, but from their passionate and vulnerable engagement with the flash form, as well as the dissident moral conscience of their thematically and stylistically intersecting critiques of Singapore's sociopolitical OB markers.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81467659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9966687
C. Chan
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.
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