Lecture by Asst. Prof. Dr. Chan Cheow Thia in the nineteenth talk of the "Tan Lark Sye Lecture Series"
The 19th session of the "Tan Lark Sye Lecture Series," organized by the Institute of International Education, New Era University College (IIE, NEUC) and the Tan Lark Sye Institute, was held on 28 June. The guest speakers for this event was Asst. Prof. Dr. Chan Cheow Thia, from the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. It was attended by more than 100 people.
The keynote speaker, Asst. Prof. Dr. Chan Cheow Thia, is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Chan holds a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Chinese at Fudan University, a Master of Philosophy in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Sinology) from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. His primary research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Sinophone studies (with a focus on Singaporean and Malaysian literature), diaspora studies, and Southeast Asian studies.
This lecture was titled “Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature”. Dr. Chan introduced Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature to explain a unique way in which modern Chinese/Sinophone literature shapes and improves the world and its own creative conditions ("worlding"). This method involves writers adopting various writing strategies to connect different literary spaces across multiple scales. Dr. Chan highlighted how creators, through practice, negotiate the inter-Asian connections between Malaya/Malaysia and other Sinophone regions, focusing on how their works portray multilingual social realities and how they reflect on colonial Malaya or post-colonial Malaysia as legitimate literary subjects. These considerations permeate the literary worlds constructed in Mahua literature, incorporating the authors’ travel experiences, their mental shifts in creating unique literary languages for their local context, and the interactions between different communities. Dr. Chan argued that alternative perspectives generated in marginal spaces are crucial for understanding the globalization of Chinese/Sinophone literature. He also emphasized the internal diversity of the margins and the historical cross-regional connections, suggesting a re-mapping of global Chinese/Sinophone literature and even world literature. The event was moderated by Assistant Professor Dr. Lew Siew Boon from NEUC. It received enthusiastic feedback, with the audience actively participating in the Q&A session and eagerly engaging in discussions.
