This presentation addresses techniques of “colonial visuality” in modern Chinese literature by authors who traveled to Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century and made the colony a setting for imaginative composition. The literary device of “South Seas Color” (Nanyang secai) deployed in these works reveals a transcolonial consciousness that appears more complex and disorienting than that viewed solely through the monochrome lens of travel to Japan and the west. As a gazing subject who cannot easily locate his reflection within the multiethnic, multilingual, and tropical landscape of the colony, the South Seas traveler’s desire to project a national Chinese consciousness within a simplistic colonizer/colonized framework is repeatedly thwarted.
Presentation will be given by Brian C. Bernards.
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