From Island to Island: Ng Kim Chew and the Language of Diaspora

Carlos Rojas examines the implications of Chinese diaspora withing Ng Kim Chew's literature

PRESENTER:  Carlos Rojas (Chinese Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, and Arts of the Moving Image, Duke University)

From Island to Island: Ng Kim Chew and the Language of Diaspora

Originally from Johor, West Malaysia, Ng Kim Chew (Huang Jinshu) currently resides in Taiwan, where he is a literature scholar and a creative author in his own right. This paper uses several of Ng Kim Chew’s short stories to examine some of the implications of the diasporic circulation of Chinese people, language, literature, and culture in the South Seas region. Ng’s fiction is useful because it is not merely a product of this diasporic movement in its own right, it simultaneously offers a critical commentary on these same processes of cultural dissemination. His work, therefore, permits an interrogation of some of the forces operating in the contact zone between what might be regarded as “China proper” and the various diasporic communities that lie beyond its borders.

Carlos Rojas is Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He works on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diasporas. He is the author of The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), and The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Harvard University Press, 2010), and is completing a book manuscript entitled The Sick Man of Asia: Diagnosing the Chinese Body Politic (Harvard University Press, 2014), which examines the political infections of discourses of disease and infection in twentieth and twenty-first century China. He is the co-editor, with David Der-wei Wang, of Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke University Press, 2007), and, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, of both Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (Routledge, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford University Press, 2013). Finally, he is the co-translator, again with Eileen Chow, of Yu Hua’s two-volume novel, Brothers (Pantheon, 2009), and the translator of Yan Lianke’s novel Lenin's Kisses (Grove/Atlantic Press, 2012).

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