Awkward Betweenness and Reluctant Metamorphosis: Eileen Chang’s Self-Translation

This article studies Eileen Chang’s (1920-1995)’s self-translation as a cultural mediation between two worlds. Different from the previous studies which either focus mainly on a single work or interpret from the perspective of Sinophone studies, this article presents a relatively inclusive view of Chang’s self-translation by contrasting her practices in the 1940s with that of the post-1950s, examining the changing Skopos that dictates how she conducted and metamorphosized her self-translations and the paradoxical relationship between her writings and her self-translations. In today’s heterotopic world where cultures converge, intersect, and interact in a multitude of ways and places, Chang’s self-translation and rewriting presents less as a study of the schizophrenically divided world but more as a study of metamorphosis, transition, and hybridity across borders.

Reconsidering Sinophone Studies: The Chinese Cold War, Multiple Sinocentrisms, and Theoretical Generalisation

Sinophone studies has improved the visibility of a range of Chinese-language cultural products and is expanding into a transnational and multilingual academic enterprise. With firm acknowledgement of the pragmatic benefits the Sinophone has brought (particularly to Anglophone and Taiwanese academia), this paper reflects on some of the problems embedded in the underlying premises and ideological mechanisms of the concept of the Sinophone that have so far been under-discussed. As a first step towards a more self-reflective meta-discourse about Sinophone studies, it highlights three areas that warrant more clarification and debate before the concept is applied to specific analyses: the significance of the Chinese Cold War; the matrix of multiple Sinocentrisms; and the double-edged sword of theoretical generalisation. In this process, I emphasise the institutional formation of the ‘Sinophone’ both as a cultural field and as an academic discourse, and highlight the significant role that Taiwan has been playing in this.

The Sinophone as Lyrical Aesthetics Redefined

This chapter attempts to demonstrate how Sinophone studies, Sinoscripts and lyrical aesthetics can help interpret contemporary Singapore Chinese poetry. Three interconnected case studies are used to highlight how various virtual ‘spaces’ of the city state are actualized as poetics. They include Liang Yue’s ‘To the Bronze Statue of Raffles’, which highlights how poetics is created with multicultural historical resources that are utilized as cultural symbols; ‘LOST’ by Xi Ni Er, in which different written scripts, modernist and post-modernist rhetoric, and visual meta-poetics are used; and Chow Teck Seng’s ‘We Speak to Fish using National Languages’, an ekphrasis which sees dialogues between languages, media and art forms, and layered historical contexts. These various poetic spaces complete the poems, giving them second lives through unlimited reincarnations.

Remapping the Sinophone

In a work that will force scholars to re-evaluate how they approach Sinophone studies, Wai-Siam Hee demonstrates that many of the major issues raised by contemporary Sinophone studies were already hotly debated in the popular culture surrounding Chinese-language films made in Singapore and Malaya during the Cold War. Despite the high political stakes, the feature films, propaganda films, newsreels, documentaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other published materials of the time dealt in sophisticated ways with issues some mistakenly believe are only modern concerns. In the process, the book offers an alternative history to the often taken-for-granted versions of film and national history that sanction anything relating to the Malayan Communist Party during the early period of independence in the region as anti-nationalist. Drawing exhaustively on material from Asian, European, and North American archives, the author unfolds the complexities produced by British colonialism and anti-communism, identity struggles of the Chinese Malayans, American anti-communism, and transnational Sinophone cultural interactions. Hee shows how Sinophone multilingualism and the role of the local, in addition to other theoretical problems, were both illustrated and practised in Cold War Sinophone cinema. Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War deftly shows how contemporary Sinophone studies can only move forward by looking backwards.