Malaysian Crossings

Rachel Leow, author of Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia:
This refreshing study restores Malaysia to its rightful place in Chinese, Asian, and world literature as a vibrant center of multiple literary crossings. Malaysia’s complex historical, cultural, and linguistic inheritances have always defied conventional frameworks that can’t see past the nation-state, and Malaysian Crossings finally begins to do justice to that complexity.

E. K. Tan, author of Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World:
This beautifully written book reexamines Sinophone Malaysia as a site of multidirectional literary production that has facilitated a rethinking of modern Chinese literature as world literature. It will be extremely useful to scholars and students in Sinophone studies, modern Chinese literary studies, Southeast Asian studies, and comparative and world literature.

Brian Bernards, author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature:
Malaysian Crossings makes a compelling, historically informed case for a multiscalar retheorizing of modern Chinese literature attentive to place. Chan deftly reassembles Malaysian Chinese literature as a linguistically and nationally fungible body of texts and authors whose intercultural insights and transregional framings creatively upscale locational marginality to produce world literature.

Margaret Hillenbrand, author of Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990:
Cheow Thia Chan’s rich and illuminating book explores how the multiple marginalizations of Malaysian Chinese literature have driven rather than delimited its inventiveness. Arguing compellingly against borders and territoriality, Chan shows how fiction consistently unrewarded on the global stage actually possesses the power to remap the contours of world literature.