Malaysian Crossings

Cheow Thia Chan’s rich and illuminating book explores how the multiple marginalizations of Malaysian Chinese literature have driven rather than delimited its inventiveness. Arguing compellingly against borders and territoriality, Chan shows how fiction consistently unrewarded on the global stage actually possesses the power to remap the contours of world literature. -- Margaret Hillenbrand, author of Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990
Malaysian Crossings makes a compelling, historically informed case for a multiscalar retheorizing of modern Chinese literature attentive to place. Chan deftly reassembles Malaysian Chinese literature as a linguistically and nationally fungible body of texts and authors whose intercultural insights and transregional framings creatively upscale locational marginality to produce world literature. -- Brian Bernards, author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature
This beautifully written book reexamines Sinophone Malaysia as a site of multidirectional literary production that has facilitated a rethinking of modern Chinese literature as world literature. It will be extremely useful to scholars and students in Sinophone studies, modern Chinese literary studies, Southeast Asian studies, and comparative and world literature. -- E. K. Tan, author of Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World
This refreshing study restores Malaysia to its rightful place in Chinese, Asian, and world literature as a vibrant center of multiple literary crossings. Malaysia’s complex historical, cultural, and linguistic inheritances have always defied conventional frameworks that can’t see past the nation-state, and Malaysian Crossings finally begins to do justice to that complexity. -- Rachel Leow, author of Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia
This wide-ranging survey of Malaysian Chinese literature will serve both as an introduction for readers new to writing from the region as well as a thoughtful recontextualization for those already familiar, sparking unexpected connections and broadening the frame of reference. A highly readable account brimming with erudition and a genuine enjoyment of literature. -- Jeremy Tiang, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for State of Emergency and 2022 Princeton University translator in residence
With an illuminating epistemological framework and erudite textual analysis, Malaysian Crossings will inspire conversations in the fields of world literature, Sinophone studies, and Southeast Asian studies, as we continue to see exciting developments of contemporary Mahua literature. -- Li Wen Jessica Tan * Asian Studies Review *
[Malaysian Crossings] should be required reading for graduate students working in Asian studies . . . [it] makes a compelling case for the expansive potential of global Chinese cultural studies by pointing out productive ways of creative engagement beyond the predictable ‘invariably writing back against China.’ -- Angie Chau * H-Asia *
Positioning Mahua literature as world literature on account of – not despite – its marginality, the book is useful not only to scholars of sinophone, East, and Southeast Asian literatures but is also an innovative guide for those grappling with the politics of recognition and the place of minor literatures in a globalised world. -- Fiona Lee * Wasafiri Magazine *
Chan mines the generative tensions produced by the imbricated conditions and pressures of Chineseness, nativism, nationalism, and diaspora . . . Invoking the concept of global marginality, Malaysian Crossings is a reminder that no condition of centrality or marginality should be treated as a given, encouraging readers to think about the local as not always national and the global as more than transnational. -- Eunice Lim * Southeast Asian Studies *
Through analyses of works by . . . authors positioned at the margins of the category of Mahua literature, Chan offers an insightful analysis of how Mahua literature’s own position at the margins of a China-centered notion of Chinese literature or a Euro-American-centered notion of world literature helps to destabilize some of the assumptions on which the latter literary categories are grounded. -- Carlos Rojas * Modern Chinese Literature & Culture *