Speaker: Wayne CF Yeung, Assistant Professor, University of Denver
Discussant: Nicholas Y. H. Wong, Assistant Professor, School of Chinese, HKU
Date: Thursday, 19 November 2026
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 10.69, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=110027
All are welcome. Registration is required.
To have a literary history of one’s own – such is a hallmark desire of many different Sinophone locales overshadowed by China-centric historical discourses. Sinophone studies has long defined itself through localization and creolization as the conceptual linchpin for identity formation in Sinitic-language communities at the margins of China proper. Local literary history remains a contentious site within this intellectual project: the narrativization of the beginnings of local literary identity often cannot circumvent its entanglements with its putative “homeland.” Would a shift of focus to the horizontal relations between Sinophone locales help us “square the circle” of local literary historiography and achieve a “thick” historical description?
Based on a forthcoming Diacritics article about sanwen and sojourners in contemporary Taiwanese literature, this presentation tries to hypothesize Sinophone literary-historical futures through the entwined roots and repeated routes of literary diasporas and settlements between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. As xinzhumin (new immigrant) increasingly takes shape as part of the political idiom of Taiwan’s global multicultural governance under the shadow of cross-strait geopolitics, it also reactivates earlier memories about Sinophone Malaysian, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese writers moving between these spaces (while repressing the settler-colonial tension they may have with indigenous populations in those unceded territories). Can literary history be had from exile itself? Outlining this question as a structuring principle in contemporary Sinophone literary field, this presentation then turns towards Gigi Leung’s The Melancholy of Trees to seek answers concerning how a literary generation may reckon with the problem of futurity after deracination and transplantation.
Wayne Yeung is an assistant professor at the University of Denver. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature, cinema, and cultural politics, with a comparative dimension drawn from French and Francophone studies.
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