Toward a Sinophone Global South Paradigm: Chang Kuei-hsing’s Monkey Cup as Example

AbstractThis article explores the potential of a Sinophone Global South paradigm by examining how marginal literature or literature from the periphery negotiates its status within a system of recognition in the production and circulation of knowledge. Using Sinophone Malaysian writer Chang Kuei-hsing’s novel, Monkey Cup, the article considers two thematic focuses under the larger paradigm of the Global South as methodology: 1) the critique of global capitalism in the form of colonial practices; and 2) the response of indigenous, marginal, and under-represented communities to the failure of globalization and its promise to support and elevate them beyond the confines of the nation states. It contends that a Global South approach to Sinophone Malaysian literature, in the case of Chang’s writing, allows us to engage in a process of unlearning/unworlding and relearning/reworlding to unearth a decolonial meaning making process of minor literatures and marginal cultures. AcknowledgmentAn earlier and longer version of this article was published in the Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities, special issue on Global South and Sinophone Literature, 51 (September 2021): 129–54.Notes1 Sparke, “Everywhere but Always Somewhere,” 117.2 López, “Introduction: The (Post)global South,” 3–6.3 Sparke, “Everywhere but Always Somewhere,” 119.4 Levander and Mignolo, “The Global South and World Dis/Order,” 1–2.5 Figueira, “‘The Global South,’” 144.6 Tee, “Sinophone Malaysian Literature,” 304.7 I use the common transcription of the term “Mahua wenxue” instead of “Ma Hua wenxue” used in Tee’s essay.8 Tee, “Sinophone Malaysian Literature,” 307–308.9 Ibid., 309.10 Brian Bernards attributes this development of Postcolonial Sinophone Malaysian literature as an attempt to go “transnational” via Taiwan, and an outcome of the Malay state’s minoritization of Sinophone communities and cultures. Bernards cites events such as the 1969 ethnic riots in Kuala Lumpur and the implementation of the National Cultural Policy (Dasar Kebudayaan Kebangsaan) as reasons for the influx of Sinophone Malaysians pursuing tertiary education in Taiwan. The policy declares Malay literature and Sinophone literature as ethnic literature. See “Creolizing the Sinophone from Malaysian to Taiwan” in Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature, 82–83, 87–88. In a sense, Taiwan functions as a site of recuperation for Sinophone Malaysian writers’ who continue to search for the myth of “cultural return” with the loss of mainland China to communism and the anti-communism rhetoric in Asia.11 Tee, “(Re)Mapping Sinophone Literature,” 89.12 Groppe, Sinophone Malaysian Literature, 19.13 Shih, Visuality and Identity, 4.14 Ibid., 5.15 Bernards, Writing the South Seas, 111.16 Chang’s Rain Forest Trilogy (Yulin sanbuqu 雨林三部曲) includes The Elephant Herd (Qunxiang 群象, 1998), Monkey Cup (Houbei 猴杯, 2000) and My South Sea Sleeping Beauty (Wo sinian de changmian zhong de nanguo gongzhu 我思念的長眠中的南國公主 2001).17 Chang, Monkey Cup, 130. Translation of the novel is mine.18 Ibid., 135.19 López, “Introduction: The (Post)global South,” 2.20 Chang, Monkey Cup, 113.21 Ibid., 114.22 In her specific study on indigenous tourism, Martinez claims that for indigenous “artists, performers, and entrepreneurs… the intelligence of participation demonstrates a sophistication, adaptability, and consciousness of multiple worldviews and the commercial negotiation these active participants complete.” See “Wrong Directions and New Maps of Voice, Representation, and Engagement,” 555, 563.23 For more on Bruyneel’s work, see The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-colonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).24 Martinez, “Wrong Directions and New Maps,” 563.25 Alexis Celeste Bunten claims in “More Like Ourselves: Indigenous Capitalism through Tourism” that “Most Indigenous tourism venues are … made possible largely through increased communications technology, the rapid expansion of the international tourism industry, and neoliberal government policies aimed to boost national economies through international visitorship and to rectify multigenerational trauma resulting from past colonial engagements, assimilationist policies, genocide, and slavery” (285–86). It is the nation state’s recognition of the importance of tourism to nation economies that opens up the potential for indigenous communities to negotiate for indigenous sovereignty.26 Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” 482.27 United Nations Development Program, Forging a Global South: United Nation Days for South-South Cooperation, December 19, 2004.28 Ibid., 476.