Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

identity construction of the Nanyang Chinese lies in the negotiation of tensions between the melancholic perpetuation of both movement and displacement, often alongside the desire for an impossible return to the Chinese ancestral homeland and amid the evolution of local cultures. However, it is through the narratives generated by this desire of an impossible return that Nanyang writers are able to translate their experiences of cultural production and identity formation between the local and the global and to shed light on another dimension of the global politics of ethnic and national identity.

Rethinking Chineseness spans the period 1965 to the present. This time frame corresponds with a new chapter for Southeast Asia as a region that, having worked its way out of its colonial past, has been and is still actively restructuring its distinctive national identities following the formation of the Federation of Malaya and the independence of Singapore.

The basic methodological framework of Rethinking Chineseness is one of narrative and genre theory. Theory of cultural translation connects the chapters and the individual works discussed by suggesting that Nanyang Chinese experiences are translational. And within the discourse of globalization, the works of these writers evolve as actors for cultural exchange and (re)production. Prominent works of Chinese diaspora studies, Chinese overseas studies, and Sinophone studies supplement Rethinking Chineseness with anthropological, sociological, and historical knowledge and approaches. Postcolonial and psychoanalytical theories facilitate the evaluation of the concept of Chineseness. The former problematizes its inherent status and exclusionary nature as an identity category. The latter traces the psychic development of works by Sinophone writers and their affinity to their original and imaginary homelands.

Using narrative devices associated with specific genres (metafiction, fictional autobiography, war narrative, and play), Rethinking Chineseness examines ways that Nanyang Chinese writers negotiate their local experiences with the dominant discourse of Chineseness. This facilitates their addressing the affects of an intersubjectivity defined simultaneously