Desire of sinophone Malaysian literature ─a Story of literariness and “friendship”

This article is the text of a talk I was invited to deliver at the “Making Taiwan on the Equator: Contemporary Mahua Literature in Motion” symposium at Nagoya University, Japan, on September 15, 2019. Although Lim and I were involved in the construction of the discourse on Sinophone Malaysian Literature in Taipei at the same time in the late 1990s, we parted ways later due to our different academic positions and personalities and ways of approaching the world, and the academic dialogue and friendship have long since ended. In view of the context of the symposium, this paper approaches the issue from a specific perspective: “literariness”, which is also the focus of our debate. After a brief review of our arguments against Sinophone Malaysian Literature over the years and a description of the situation of Malaysian Chinese Literature, I will also introduce some of my recent research experiences in such studies.