Project Overview
Chao Foon(Jiaofeng) is a print literary journal in Chinese from Malaya (and postcolonial Malaysia) that still runs today, with a brief hiatus between 1999 and 2002. The first hundred issues of Chao Foon were chosen to reflect the journal’s years of publishing content from and about Malaya, before it started introducing world literature, with a change of editor around issue 101. Starting in November 1955 and publishing twice a month, Chao Foon became a monthly publication in November 1958.
The history of Cold War literary modernism has been reconsidered through expanded archives, the remapping of publishing networks, and the exposing of the hegemony of institutions like the CIA. The late 1950s was a high period of decolonization, in which Third World humanism influenced literary production.
This project examines how a Mahua(Chinese-Malayan) literary journal that is called “modernist” in decolonizing Malaya relate, or does not relate, to such global discussions. Chao Foon, not to mention other Malayan journals, has rarely been included in studies of Cold War modernism. The debates and frameworks of the Cold War Modernism tends to originate from Euro-American contexts or decolonizing French contexts. For the first time, a dataset is created for the study of Mahua literature, sometimes seen as a ‘minor’ field in Chinese studies.
This dataset serves as an important benchmark for computational literary studies of Mahua modernism. Users can use the dataset to run multiple tools to evaluate their usefulness in detecting semantic change in time-sliced corpora, as well as track emergent concepts in Chao Foon.
Research Outcome
The project has successfully developed a suite of interactive visualizations, including force-directed graphs and word clouds, which illustrate the semantic relationships within Malaysian-Chinese literary history. These digital tools provide a new methodological framework for scholars to explore linguistic trends and historical keywords. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of migrant identity in Southeast Asia and are expected to lead to peer-reviewed publications in digital humanities and literary studies journals, as well as presentations at relevant academic conferences.
About the researcher
Nicholas Wong is a literary historian of Southeast Asian Chinese writing. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and a BA in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese, and formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at HKU. His research focuses on media and modernity in China and Southeast Asia, resource extraction, literary politics, Chinese-English translation, transnationalism and diaspora, poetry and poetics.
Fund Source
Early Career Scheme (ECS)
For inquiries, please contact
atlab@hku.hk