Between Colonialism and Despotism

The Mengjiang 蒙疆 puppet regime was established in Inner Mongolia by Japanese colonizers, in collaboration with the Mongolian Prince Demchugdongrub, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Mengjiang regime tried to revive Mongolian culture in the name of resisting Chinese despotism. However, the Japanese supported the Mongols' desire for “self-determination” merely to use it as a vehicle for their colonial designs. Through a close reading of several texts that appeared in Sinophone magazines published in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia during the war, this article explicates the distinctions between Han writers' and Mongol intellectuals' nationalist writings, in order to theorize the dual oppression of the Mongol minority culture under Japanese colonialism and Chinese despotism. Despite the mission of this so-called Mongolian nation-state to write in a Mongolian style, the Han writers in Mengjiang expressed their ethnic identity through Sinophone literature; at the same time, Sinicized Mongol intellectuals failed to revive Mongolian culture through the same vehicle. In the end, both the former Han despots and the new Japanese colonizers tried to instrumentalize Mongol minority culture to establish their own cultural hegemony. Under this dual oppression of foreign colonialism and native despotism, the Sinophone nationalist writings of the Han majority and the Mongol minority problematize any simple binarism of colonizer and colonized.

A Surplus of Fish: Language, Literature, and Cultural Ecologies in Ng Kim Chew’s Fiction

This essay uses an examination of intertwined thematics of fish and text in the fiction of the ethnically Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew in order to reflect on a broader set of ecological concerns, including issues relating to the natural ecology of the Southeast Asian regions depicted in Ng’s works, together with the overlapping literary ecosystems within which his works are embedded. In particular, the essay is concerned with the ways in which Ng’s fiction reflects on the relationship between the field of Southeast Asian Sinophone literature and the partially overlapping ecosystem of world literature.

Research on the Beginnings of Cambodian Sinophone Literature

Based on research done in the National Archives of Cambodia on the Sino-Cambodian newspaper Mekong Yat Pao and its literary supplements, this report has two main objectives: firstly, since the field of Sinophone literature in the Cambodian Kingdom has seldom been researched, to write a general introduction to the history of the newspaper and its historical context; and then to describe in detail the contents of the literary supplements, trying to understand their development according to a periodization through which one can follow the evolution of the dominant literary genres and the parallel political events of the 1950–60s in Cambodia and mainland China.

“Republic of Southern Sinophone Literature” and Its Memorandum

This essay reexamines two Sinophone literary uchronias, i.e. Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) author Ng Kim Chew’s dystopian account of the People’s Republic of Nanyang, and Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung’s fabrication of the history of a disappeared street in Hong Kong. As representative pieces of Sinophone literature, these two literary uchronias not only rewrite the authors’ local histories but also bring together a critical examination of the geo-political conditions in the Sinophone sphere. Reflecting on the spatialized and materialist models of world literature studies, this essay aims to investigate the Hong Kong-Mahua link in terms of their world-making power.

ETHNIC IDENTITY AND OTHER FEATURES OF MODERN SINOPHONE… TIBETAN LITERATURE

This paper focuses on a scope of short stories starting from 1980s produced by writers, who are ethnic Tibetans or come from mixed Sino-Tibetan families, but write in Chinese, which is either their native language, or have been acquired in childhood. I am interested in discerning specific features of this literature, which make it stand apart from modern sinophone literature produced by ethnic Hans and represent ethnic identity by means of a medium unfamiliar to many of these writers.