This essay situates resource extraction politics in the twin formation of Malayan intellectual and literary thought as embodied by Nanyang Studies and Mahua literature. Rather than Chinese-Malayan, Sino-Malay, and sinophone Malaysian, I explore Mahua literature as Chinese-language literature from the Malay Peninsula, along the rich tin-belt stretching from Ranong and Phuket to Bangka and Belitung. I argue that its coinage was an anti-colonial response to Malaya’s export-oriented colonial economy at the height of the international tin trade during the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, I trace the intellectual origins of Nanyang Studies, not to its actual founding in Singapore in 1940, but to its founder Hsu Yun-Tsiao’s experience of the central peninsula and ports, as recounted in his Patani diaries (1933). For centuries, southern Thailand and northern Malaya experienced Chinese migration due to the tin trade, and their development under Siamese and British spheres of influence and local Malay rule can be conceived as a geohistorical unit. It was only the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909 that formed the present-day border between Malaysia and Thailand, and how we now conceive the national boundaries between Mahua and Taihua literatures. But the long history of the tin trade’s Phuket-Penang sea route and Patani-Perak-Kedah overland routes not only influenced the internationalist, cosmopolitan, and anti-colonial thinking of Hsu’s work, but also facilitated his recruitment to teach the descendants of Chinese laborers and capitalists in the first place. Nanyang Studies’s historical consciousness of borderlands and coastlines contains non-national strategies for intellectual decolonization within Mahua literary development.
Nicholas Y. H. Wong holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, he will deepen his study of global networks of commodities and industries as they transact the writing of literary history. His current book project examines the impact of tin and rubber on the Malay Peninsula and the aesthetic forms of minority relations and differences they generate in Chinese-language writing. In short, he is writing a materialist and geoeconomic history of Mahua literature and intellectual culture. During his Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship at the National Library Singapore in 2018, he did archival research into the Nanyang historian Hsu Yun-Tsiao’s unpublished diaries, written in classical Chinese in Patani, Siam during the 1930s. His articles have appeared in CLEAR (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews) and Chapters on Asia.
Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))
Panel 5: Politics and Poetics of Nature
7:30-9pm HK/SG / 12:30-2pm BST / 1:30-3pm CEST / 7:30-9am EDT / 4:30-6am PDT