Speakers:

Brian Bernards is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Specializing in Sinophone and Southeast Asian literature and cinema, he is author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature (2015) and co-editor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013). His journal articles have appeared in positions: asia critique, Asian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies, and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. He is currently working on two monographs, one on inter-Asian cinema and the other on translingual Sinophone flash fiction and short film in Southeast Asia.

Prof. E.K. Tan 陳榮強 will speak on “Conciliatory Amalgamation: The Politics of Survival in Sinophone Uyghur Writer Padi Guli’s A Hundred Years of Bloodline (2015),” which tells the story of Fatima, a Uyghur woman’s journey to unpack her family history while struggling to understand the status of ethnic minorities in the larger fabric of multi-ethnic China. The novel concludes with a positive message calling for ethnic integration. Tan reads the novel against the PRC’s ethnic minority policy to examine the implications of the protagonist’s cultural, linguist, and geopolitical border-crossing as she comes to terms with ethnic amalgamation as a necessary mode of survival. This allows the novel to be read as a symptom of Padi Guli’s status as a Sinophone Uyghur writer who establishes herself within the dominant tradition of Chinese literature.

E.K. Tan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and the author of Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World.

Co-Sponsors:

UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Dept. of East Asian Languages & Literature

Department of Asian & Asian American Studies of Stony Brook University

Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures of the University of Southern California.