Malaysian Crossings - (Global Chinese Culture) by Cheow Thia Chan (Paperback)

About the Book

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that Mahua authors' grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for--rather than a barrier to--aesthetic inventiveness.

Book Synopsis

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have produced creative and thought-provoking works that have won growing critical recognition, showing Malaysia to be a laboratory for imaginative Chinese writing.

Highlighting Mahua literature's distinctive mode of evolution, Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that authors' grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for--rather than a barrier to--aesthetic inventiveness. He foregrounds the historical links between Malaysia and other Chinese-speaking regions, tracing how Mahua writers engage in the "worlding" of modern Chinese literature by navigating interconnected literary spaces. Focusing on writers including Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, whose works craft signature literary languages, Chan examines narrative representations of multilingual social realities and authorial reflections on colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Delineating the inter-Asian "crossings" of Mahua literary production--physical journeys, interactions among social groups, and mindset shifts--from the 1930s to the 2000s, he contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.

Review Quotes

A critical addition to the growing body of scholarship in Sinophone Studies focusing on Mahua literature.... Malaysian Crossings offers a fresh perspective that suggests that multiscalar peripherality and marginality can also be rescaled within and across the margins. Malaysia, with its distinct cultural and linguistic diversity not mirrored in other Sinophone regions, emerges as an ideal site to test the boundaries and meanings of literary crossings.-- "Sojourn"

Chan's study of Mahua literature should methodologically interest scholars of modern Chinese and other Sinophone literatures as well.... the privilege Chan accords to authors whose identity does not cohere isomorphically with Malaysia's territoriality is particularly inspiring to Hong Kong literary studies which also need to deal with similar problems.-- "Chinese Literature and Thought Today"

What Malaysian Crossings successfully does is to show that no matter how small or large a literary work may be, it is undergirded by discourses of space and place.-- "Journal of Asian Studies"

Through analyses of works by . . . authors positioned at the margins of the category of Mahua literature, Chan offers an insightful analysis of how Mahua literature's own position at the margins of a China-centered notion of Chinese literature or a Euro-American-centered notion of world literature helps to destabilize some of the assumptions on which the latter literary categories are grounded.--Carlos Rojas "Modern Chinese Literature & Culture"

Chan mines the generative tensions produced by the imbricated conditions and pressures of Chineseness, nativism, nationalism, and diaspora . . . Invoking the concept of global marginality, Malaysian Crossings is a reminder that no condition of centrality or marginality should be treated as a given, encouraging readers to think about the local as not always national and the global as more than transnational.--Eunice Lim "Southeast Asian Studies"

Positioning Mahua literature as world literature on account of - not despite - its marginality, the book is useful not only to scholars of sinophone, East, and Southeast Asian literatures but is also an innovative guide for those grappling with the politics of recognition and the place of minor literatures in a globalised world.--Fiona Lee "Wasafiri Magazine"

[Malaysian Crossings] should be required reading for graduate students working in Asian studies . . . [it] makes a compelling case for the expansive potential of global Chinese cultural studies by pointing out productive ways of creative engagement beyond the predictable 'invariably writing back against China.'--Angie Chau "H-Asia"

Malaysian Crossings makes a compelling, historically informed case for a multiscalar retheorizing of modern Chinese literature attentive to place. Chan deftly reassembles Malaysian Chinese literature as a linguistically and nationally fungible body of texts and authors whose intercultural insights and transregional framings creatively upscale locational marginality to produce world literature.--Brian Bernards, author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature

Cheow Thia Chan's rich and illuminating book explores how the multiple marginalizations of Malaysian Chinese literature have driven rather than delimited its inventiveness. Arguing compellingly against borders and territoriality, Chan shows how fiction consistently unrewarded on the global stage actually possesses the power to remap the contours of world literature.--Margaret Hillenbrand, author of Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990

This beautifully written book reexamines Sinophone Malaysia as a site of multidirectional literary production that has facilitated a rethinking of modern Chinese literature as world literature. It will be extremely useful to scholars and students in Sinophone studies, modern Chinese literary studies, Southeast Asian studies, and comparative and world literature.--E. K. Tan, author of Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World

This refreshing study restores Malaysia to its rightful place in Chinese, Asian, and world literature as a vibrant center of multiple literary crossings. Malaysia's complex historical, cultural, and linguistic inheritances have always defied conventional frameworks that can't see past the nation-state, and Malaysian Crossings finally begins to do justice to that complexity.--Rachel Leow, author of Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia

This wide-ranging survey of Malaysian Chinese literature will serve both as an introduction for readers new to writing from the region as well as a thoughtful recontextualization for those already familiar, sparking unexpected connections and broadening the frame of reference. A highly readable account brimming with erudition and a genuine enjoyment of literature.--Jeremy Tiang, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for State of Emergency and 2022 Princeton University translator in residence

With an illuminating epistemological framework and erudite textual analysis, Malaysian Crossings will inspire conversations in the fields of world literature, Sinophone studies, and Southeast Asian studies, as we continue to see exciting developments of contemporary Mahua literature.--Li Wen Jessica Tan "Asian Studies Review"

About the Author

Cheow Thia Chan is assistant professor of Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore.