Circuits of Identities in the Margins: Multicultural Encounters and Hybrid Biopolitics in Sinophone Texts across Greater China and Southeast Asia

Abstract

This thesis engages with the praxis of diasporic Sinophone biopolitics across East Asia exploring travelling imaginaries, hybrid material cultures, and articulations of embodied difference striking across geopolitical and temporal boundaries. By considering the interfaces of ethnic Chinese across local cultures in Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong inflected by globalizing influences, I question how a cohesive Sinophone identity outside mainland China might be nurtured and managed through a multicultural approach. Through the lens of literary works by Li Yongping (李永平), Kuo Pao Kun (郭寶崑), and Wong Bik-Wan (黃碧雲), this thesis investigates the heterogeneous formation of Sinophone identities calibrated by the time and place specificities of each articulation and lived practice. Each author articulates distinct yet intersecting perspectives towards the Sinophone body as one that is gendered and (de)sexualized and the sociopolitical consequences of linguistic hybridity at the crossroads of international margins and routes. The first chapter takes up Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral 《郑和的 后代》 (1995) to tease out Singapore’s multilingualism, racial hybridity, and the impact of the city-state’s language policies on ethnic Chinese identity. The second chapter will focus on Li Yongping, a Sinophone Malaysian author who emigrated to Taiwan, and the affective images of wandering, ghostly ethnic Chinese women circulating in his work. The third chapter delves into Wong Bik-wan’s short story collection, Tenderness and Violence《温柔与爆裂》 (1994), and her misogynistic perspective on the corporeal manifestations of Sinophone Hong Kong modernity. By attending to the physical and conceptual movements that these texts each represent and enable, close analyses of the figures populating all three works illuminate the power of gendered and subaltern bodies as they intersect with critical frameworks of postcoloniality and Sinophone studies. Taken together, this thesis argues that Sinophone synergies across diverse Sinitic communities create a space for interaction and negotiation to reevaluate the Chinese identity and “Chineseness” vis-à-vis tradition, cultural uniformity, geographical boundaries, geopolitical boundaries, biopolitical manifestations, and transculturation.