(RE)MAPPING LITERATURE

Tee Kim Tong

In the early twentieth century, in spite of social and political turbu- lence, a vernacular literature emerged in and produced a mod- ern literary tradition, particularly after the May Fourth new literary movement of 1919. But the Chinese literati did not have a monopoly as producers of Sinophone literary texts. Emigrant Chinese, who since the nineteenth century have formed various diasporic communities in the Nanyang—or the Southern Ocean, as as a region was commonly known to the Chinese in the colonial days—and other parts of the world, also produced literary works in the Sinophone. These diasporic Chinese communities were able to maintain some cultural activities and cultivate their literary fields, minor and margin- alized though they were. After the Second World War, the political situation in Asia changed greatly as most colonial Southeast Asian countries gained their independence. In the Sinophone world, while China became the Communist PRC in 1949, and remained colonies until the handovers in 1997 and 1999 respectively, and became the Nationalist KMT’s base to strike back at the mainland. Since then the development of literature in different cultural environments around China has followed different historical trajectories. Over at least three decades in the twentieth century, literature pro- duced in the Sinophone communities outside China has been gener- ally classified as either “haiwai huawen wenxue 海外華文文學” ( literature) or “shijie huawen wenxue 世界華文文學” (world /global Chinese literature) by critics and scholars in Taiwan and China alike.1 Much has been written about such a construction or categorization already. As an imprecise geopolitical label, “overseas Chinese literature” indicates the dominant position,

1 In addition to the different “shijie huawen wenxue xuehui 世界華文文學學會” (associations of world Chinese literature) in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, there have been conferences on the topic held and journals thus entitled published in these regions. 78 tee kim tong marginalizing ideology, and co-optive operation of Chinese literature as both national and ethnic literature. By the same token, “world Chinese literature” refers exclusively to Chinese literary articulations around the world, but not those of China, as if it were an extrater- restrial country. In earlier days other terms such as “Huaqiao wenxue 華僑文學” and “qiaomin wenxue 僑民文學” (overseas compatriot litera- ture) were used, claiming the literary products by Chinese who resided overseas as Chinese sojourners’ literature. For obvious reasons, these terms became misnomers in the postcolonial era. In recent years, to overcome the limitations and problems of the old and the older con- cepts and answer the call for a new concept that designates a structural and ideological difference, scholars such as Dominic Cheung, Shih Shu-mei, and David Der-wei Wang have respectively reformulated the English term “Sinophone literature” to refer to the theoretical cat- egory of literature written in Chinese (mostly produced outside China). However, whereas Shih distinguishes “Sinophone literature” from “Chinese literature,” both Cheung and Wang emphasize the term’s inclusive capacity and possibility. Inspired by the phenomena of Anglophone and Francophone lit- eratures and encouraged by Gao Xingjian’s reflections on literature in Chinese, in a Chinese essay presented at the conference on “Perspec- tives in Global Sinophone Literature in the Twenty-first Century,” Dominic Cheung, himself a “Sinophone Chinese American” poet, proposed that instead of national boundary, language should be used as the criterion of categorization for Sinophone literature so as to avoid “unnecessary ideological conflicts” (2003:13).2 According to Cheung, “categorized by language, rather than political entity, contemporary Sinophone writings concentrate mainly on four regions, namely, 1) ; 2) Taiwan; 3) Southeast Asia; and 4) Hong Kong and other overseas places” (2003:13). In his observation, Sinophone literature forms various imaginative communities: “Using the same language, like the many branches of one tree, they generate individu- ally and become a multiple system, within which parallel development, cross reference, mutual influence, and rejection take place” (2003:14). The “tree” in Cheung’s context symbolizes the linguistic family tree.

2 Cheung translated “Anglophone” and “Francophone” in Chinese as “Yingyu muyu 英語母語” (English as mother tongue) and “Fayu muyu 法語母語” (French as mother tongue) respectively, referring to all global terrains where English and French speakers use the colonial language as their mother tongue (Cheung, 2005).