Sinophone Circuits: Chinese-language Cultural Production, Southeast Asia, and the Cold War

Abstract

This dissertation examines the transnational literary and media practices that characterized Sinophone Southeast Asian cultural production during the Cold War to reconsider the theoretical contentions of the Sinophone paradigm. Contrary to the notion that the Cold War resulted in isolated geo-political blocks, I argue that the need to gain ideological clout, readers, and audiences intensified the connections between Southeast Asia and East Asia, as well as between countries in Southeast Asia. I highlight Southeast Asia as a focal point in the transnational circuit of Sinophone cultural production between 1945 and the 1960s—a region that saw the greatest battle for the hearts and minds of the Chinese diaspora during an intensive period of decolonization and the Cold War. While current scholarship tends to regard the Chinese in Southeast Asia as passive recipients of information during the Cold War, I emphasize the agency of these cultural actors who were actively travelling, producing, and forging transcultural alliances and transnational networks of cultural production across Southeast Asia.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach that engages with Sinophone, Cold War studies, and world literature, I propose two interrelated concepts—worlding and Sinophone heterotemporalities—as interventions into the field of Sinophone studies. I draw on Pheng Cheah’s argument of world literature in which he argues the world should be understood as a temporal process rather than a spatial category and that literature can serve as an active and polemical force in this process of world-making. In each chapter, I discuss a specific literary or visual strategy of “worlding,” which I define as proactive interventions with local socio-cultural circumstances and varied attempts of creating “worlds” through selective connections and disconnections within this Cold War transnational Sinophone circuit. Chapter One examines Malaya-born Chinese writer Han Meng’s editorial vision of Equatorial Literary Series as a form of worlding, in which he features literature that cover not only multiple sites but also multiple revolutionary moments to foster class solidarity across Nanyang. Chapter Two proposes that Malaya-born Wei Beihua’s and Indonesian-born Chinese writer Hei Ying’s anachronistic and post-loyalist writings reveal the gaps in national literary histories shaped by Cold War politics and introduce alternative temporalities of revolution. Chapter Three investigates worlding through gender and identifies the ethnicized bodies of Malay women in Shanghai emigres Liu Yichang’s interracial Nanyang romances and the voices of cosmopolitan modern women in Evan Yang’s films as key tropes in worlding an apolitical, sentimental Free Asia. Chapter Four discusses how China writer Wang Anyi’s and Taiwan-based Malaysian director Lau Kek Huat’s works inspired by their family histories, which are intertwined with Singapore’s and Malaysia’s forgotten leftist histories, regenerate worlds that are premised on circuits of affective and kinship ties. When examined collectively, these chapters foreground the simultaneous and contesting articulations of world-making across ideological and geographical divides during the Cold War, constituting what I term Sinophone heterotemporalities. I conclude by suggesting that beyond the Sinophone paradigm that is still based on a spatial imagination of national borders and center-periphery relations, the concept of temporality is one possible avenue to uncover the alternative modernities and temporalities experienced by the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.