Friday, February 5, 3:00-5:00 PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St.)
Nic Wong, “Whither Ng Kim Chew’s Nanyang People’s Republic?: History, Ethics, and Literary Writing”
Please join us this Friday, February 5, as we welcome Nic Wong (Comparative Literature, University of Chicago), who will be presenting a chapter draft from his dissertation. As Nic summarizes, “In reading Ng Kim Chew (Huang Jinshu)’s recent fiction and essays, this chapter considers the genre of ‘Malayan communist writings’ (magong shuxie) as the site of the historical entanglement of literary movements of social(ist) realism and modernism in the wake of decolonization and nation-building movements during the Cold War. Ng’s imaginative anti-genealogy of ‘Malayan communist writings’ explores and critiques post-loyalist attachments to the bygone concepts of Nanyang and Malaya, and shrewdly introduces literariness as a form of ethics—a key term left out of discussions of materiality in Sinophone studies and studies of the genre.”
A draft of the chapter is available via this link. Please do not circulate or cite the chapter without permission of the author. If you have not received the password for the post, or if you have concerns about accessibility for this meeting, please do not hesitate to email David Krolikoski at davidkroli at uchicago.edu or Brian White at bmwhite at uchicago.edu.
