Events

DISCUSSANT

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

SPEAKERS

Prof Nguyen Nam, Vietnam National University

Dr Claudine Ang, Yale-NUS College

Dr Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt, Thammasat University, Thailand

Dr Chang Yufen, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

SUMMARY

What is China? Inspired by postcolonial studies and Sinophone studies, a rich scholarship has been produced in an attempt to answer this question by perusing and analyzing how China and Chineseness are imagined by Chinese communities all over the world. This round table extends the discussion both back to the 17th century and to non-Chinese speakers. It contributes to Sinophone scholarship by exploring the richly diverse ways China has been reinvented in Southeast Asia. The roundtable focuses on the literary interconnections between China, on the one hand, and Vietnam and Thailand on the other, investigating how Chinese literature and Chinese characters are appropriated and transformed for various purposes, including the redefinition of Chineseness. Four speakers will discuss the following topics: 1) Vietnam’s visualization of the Chinese classic historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 2) the Thai intellectuals’ reproduction of famous Chinese leftist writer Lu Xun’s works, 3) the Ming loyalists’ Chinese landscape poems intended to “civilize” the Mekong delta, as well as 4) the colonial Vietnamese Confucian scholars’ adventure tales.

ABSTRACTS

Border-crossing Images and the Roles of Local Communities: Collective Visualization of the Three Kingdoms in Vietnam
by Prof Nguyen Nam

The Sanguo Yanyi (aka. Romance of the Three Kingdoms; hereafter, Three Kingdoms) has been with Vietnamese readers for long time: traces of this novel could be found in literary allusions embedded in Vietnamese literature as early as in early 15th century. Several characters of the novel have become integral parts of Vietnamese culture; and in their new visual representations realized by the locals, these characters vividly accompanied them in many different walks of life. The paper focuses on the transnational images of a number of scenes and characters from the novel. It shows how enduring cultural exchanges between China and Vietnam have continuously shaped and reshaped visual representations of the Three Kingdoms in the receiving culture, and how those representations have been localized by both Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese communities accordingly on the basis of different artistic and pictorial traditions. Through an examination of folk paintings, popular decorative arts, and religious sculptures, the paper also analyses the interaction between these traditions that has partaken in the integration of the novel into local culture up to present.

From Ideology to Academy: the Study of Lu Xun in Postwar Thailand
by Dr Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt

This paper examines the study of Lu Xun, China’s greatest modern writer for most of the 20th century, in Thailand since the Second World War. It illustrates the social background, economic setting and cultural factors governing the production (including translation), dissemination and acceptance of Lu Xun’s works in the Thai language. This paper argues that, in the early 1950s, the translation and introduction of Lu Xun’s works in a progressive magazine run by avant-garde intellectuals, was aimed to publicize a political ideology. Especially in the mid 1970s, the study of Lu Xun reached its pinnacle in Thailand when Thai intellectuals closely allied themselves with the Thai Communist Party. As such many of his works were re-translated, re-narrated, re-studied and, therefore, became rediscovered among the leftists. However, from the early 1980’s on, the end of the Cold War in Southeast Asia and the normalization of relations between Thailand and China began to give rise to the study of Lu Xun in academia. A large amount of scholarship, from different academic disciplines, offers a fresh perspective to understand and interpret Lu Xun’s works that were institutionalized. Therefore, this paper concludes that the study of Lu Xun in postwar Thailand is significantly related to the social and political circumstances of its time that was presented.

Ten Songs of Hà Tiên: Ming Loyalists and the Southern Vietnamese Frontier Landscape
by Dr Claudine Ang

In the aftermath of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, a group of Chinese Ming loyalists settled in Ha Tien (now located on the border between Cambodia and Vietnam) on the Mekong delta. On those frontier lands, they built a flourishing city around a busy port that maintained close trading connections with Guangdong, Fujian, and Chinese communities along the Vietnamese coastline. Through works of literature composed on the frontier, Chinese literati attempted to shape the cultural and political landscape of the Mekong delta. This paper examines an ambitious eighteenth-century literary project, which takes as its topic the landscape of the port-city of Ha Tien. In this project, Ha Tien’s ten scenic sites were first described in poetry, then distributed via the South China Sea trading network to thirty-one other poets scattered along the Vietnamese and southern Chinese coast. The poets were asked to compose matching suites of poems and to return them to Ha Tien with the next sailing season. The poems appear to be lyrical celebrations of nature; I argue, however, that they were a medium through which the originator of the project rendered his domain civilized by bringing it into cultured discourse. Moreover, I have discovered that the poems contained coded messages urging dispersed Ming loyalists to make Ha Tien their new capital.

The Wonderful and Terrible Civilization: Colonial Vietnamese Confucian Scholars Imagining Văn Minh in Adventure Tales and Travel Writings
by Dr Chang Yufen

In the early twentieth century, a small group of Vietnamese reformist Confucian scholars under French colonial rule compiled a small but distinctive body of literature describing their imaginary adventures in Western civilization. The postcolonial scholars have examined how the concept of civilization made its way into non-Western societies in the 18th and 19th centuries, establishing itself as a universal criterion for claims of sovereignty. They have also shed light on how various cultural forms, including adventure tales and travel books, helped shape imperial identity by presenting non-Western cultures as a dangerous frontier outside the reach of civilization and waiting to be tamed by heroes from the West. Nevertheless, civilization has been treated as a singular concept with a one-dimensional meaning, whereas a look into the adventure tales and travel writings by Vietnamese Confucian scholars suggests otherwise. In these writings, these scholars critiqued Western and other versions of civilization or văn minh in Vietnamese, by utilizing three literary tropes originating in China and popular in East Asia: the scholar-beauty (caizi jiaren; tài tử giai nhân) romance, the rivers-and-lakes (jianghu; giâng hồ) setting, and the peach blossom spring (taoyuan; đào nguyên) utopia longing and dystopia critique. Drawing upon this body of hitherto neglected literary works, this paper argues that postcolonial studies should take into account the multilayered meanings and perceptions of civilization constructed by colonial subjects.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Chan Nguyen Nam 阮南 is a lecturer and the former Chairperson of the Division of East Asian Studies (1993-1994), and Division of Chinese Studies (2010-2012), College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City. After earning his MA (Regional Studies – East Asia) and PhD (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Chinese Literature) from Harvard, he worked as the manager of the Academic Program of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (HYI) from 2004 to 2010. During the summer of 2013, he taught as visiting professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia, Asian African Institute, Hamburg University. He has also served as lecturer for Overseas Study Program of Loyola University Chicago in Ho Chi Minh City since 2012. His research interests focus on comparative literature (dealing mainly with China and Vietnam), and translation studies. He is currently an associate of the HYI.

Claudine Ang is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (History) with Yale-NUS College. She specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century southern Vietnamese frontier history and literature. Her dissertation, “Statecraft on the Margins: Drama, Poetry, and the Civilizing Mission in Eighteenth-Century Southern Vietnam,” was awarded the 2012 Lauriston Sharp Prize by Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program. She is also interested in twentieth-century Vietnamese historiography and has recently published on the topic in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt, PhD （陈玉珊） is a born and bred Thai-Chinese, Kornphanat is currently teaching Chinese history at the department of history, Thammasat University of Thailand. She received PhD in Chinese Studies from NUS in 2012, with the thesis entitled “The Urban Culture of Chinese Society in Bangkok: Cinemas, Broadcast, and Literature, 1950s-1970s”. Her interests lie in cultural exchanges between China and Southeast Asia, as she is doing research on the history of translation of modern Chinese literature in Thailand, and China’s soft power in Southeast Asia.

Chang Yufen received her PhD in sociology from University of Michigan. She has a wide range of research interests: cultural sociology, comparative historical sociology, nationalism, social movements, literature, religions, East Asia, and overseas Chinese. Her dissertation is about how colonial Vietnamese intellectuals established national written language, national literature, and national learning by emulating, differentiating from, and syncretizing elements of Chinese and French cultural models.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg