Abstract
The Malaysian Chinese magazine Chao Foon (1955-1999) is a representative contribution to the local literary ecosystem in Malaysia as well as Sinophone literature. Its lengthy publication history also witnessed and resonated with world history throughout half a century. This thesis will explore Chao Foon’s literary production in the Cold War context between 1955 and 1969. It aims to tease out the introduction and translation practices that Chao Foon did during the Cold War, scrutinize the canonic transformation trajectory, and unearth the magazine’s sophisticated negotiation with cultural China, Western literary canons, and Afro-Asian literature.The research will be carried out by close reading and textual analysis of the introduction, translation, commentaries, and other paratexts in the magazine and resort to writers’ and editors’ memoir, interviews, and archive documents. Integrating translation studies, cultural studies and the history of books, this thesis looks into the subjectivity of different agents in the publication and circulation process, including translators, editors and the transregional intellectual network.
The thesis will be divided into three sections thematically. The first section will address the first publication period of the magazine when modern Chinese literature and diasporic writings constituted the main body. However, as a cultural production under the Cold War antagonism and a Southeast Asian base camp of the American power, the Chao Foon magazine deliberately and gradually stripped off elements tinted with cultural China. Chapter two investigates the trajectory of introducing and translating Western literary canon from the aspect of three agents: editors, translators and printing culture. Chapter three explores an alternative interpretation of Chao Foon’s Malaysianization from its translation of African and Southeast Asian literature. The local Islam tradition and Malaya’s headquarter position in the Southeast Asian Chinese community led Chao Foon to the Afro-Asian literature introduction, and this chapter will mainly examine two translators’ contribution to introducing contemporary Egyptian and Indonesian literature.
The research will be conducted under the term “worlding” coined by Heidegger. I will go for its most popular denotation as an ever-changing mapping process with different agents; in Chao Foon’s case, the changing atlas of literary works and canons over 15 years. The thesis is also a preliminary attempt to posit Malaysian Chinese literature in the world literature mapping. Chao Foon was not only a base camp of Malaysian modernism but also opened possibilities in circulating different dimensions of world literature embodied by Afro-Asian literature.
| Date of Award | 17 Aug 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Wendong CUI (Supervisor) |