Event

EALC Lecture

Through an examination of short stories from Malaysian-Chinese author Ng Kim Chew's 2001 collection From Island to Island, in this talk I will reflect the taxonomical functions of criteria such language, ethnicity, and nationality, particularly as they inform contemporary discussions of Chinese, Sinophone, and Mahua (Malaysian-Chinese) literature. Several of Ng's stories are set on remote islands and feature individuals who have been forcibly separated from their original linguistic or social environment, and as such they offer a vehicle for reflecting on some of the consequences of literary that arbitrarily prioritize one criterion (such as language or nationality) over others. Drawing on Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance, I propose a taxonomical system that does not rely on a single criterion but rather attends to the dynamic interaction between a variety of different criteria, while using the resulting model to interrogate the naturalized conception of the family on which Wittgenstein himself relies.

Carlos Rojas is Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Arts of the Moving Image, and his research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies.