Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Prasenjit Duara, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This talk will focus on the activities of Union (Youlian) Publishing House in the 1950s and 60s, focusing particularly on the two Chinese-language cultural/literary journals published by this institution: The Chinese Student Weekly (Zhongguo Xuesheng Zhoubao) and Jiao Feng (Palm Winds). Backed by Asia Foundation in the U.S., Union was a trans-Pacific cultural network complexly embedded in Cold War politics, postcolonial nation-building, and Chinese diasporic identity formation in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. In the imaginary geography of Union Publishing House, Hong Kong was a center of the Chinese diasporic worlds, connecting disparate Chinese communities in Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaya, through the circulation of Union’s publications in their various local editions. My talk will focus on this institution’s activities in Singapore/Malaya, a location that in the 1950s and 60s provided a most receptive ground for Union’s publications to take root in a local context, manifesting complicated transvaluations of its cultural agenda through negotiations with local politics and culture. The talk will examine the intellectual tradition this transnational and diasporic culture drew from, the reflections on language politics and nation building in Hong Kong and postcolonial Malaya, and the literary and aesthetic values promoted by Union. It also seeks to reflect on and rethink some contemporary transnational paradigms influential in literary studies (“world literature”, “Sinophone studies”, “global Chinese literature”) in light of this Cold War cultural network.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Shen Shuang is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semicolonial Shanghai (Rutgers, 2009) and co-editor of a special issue of Social Text on “China and the Human” (2011 and 2012). She has published articles and essays in English and Chinese in various top-ranking academic journals and cultural magazines, including MLQ, Modern China, MCLC, PMLA, Xinmin Weekly and Wanxiang. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature and culture, Asian diaspora literatures and cultures, postcolonial theory and literature, global Anglophone literature.

Prof Shen Shuang has commenced a three-month appointment as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Asian Connections Metacluster with effect from 1 July 2015. While at ARI, she will focus on the transnational circulation of Sinophone print culture in the Asia Pacific during the Cold War period. She is interested in exploring Chinese diasporic cultural formation in an inter-ethnic and intra-Asia context and its negotiations with the hegemonic ideologies of the Cold War.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.