This volume explores the diverse linguistic landscape of Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities. Based on archival research and previously unpublished linguistic fieldwork, it unearths a wide variety of language histories, linguistic practices, and trajectories of words. The localized and often marginalized voices we bring to the spotlight are quickly disappearing in the wake of standardization and homogenization, yet they tell a story that is uniquely Southeast Asian in its rich hybridity. Our comparative scope and focus on language, analysed in tandem with history and culture, adds a refreshing dimension to the broader field of Sino-Southeast Asian Studies.

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, American studies, black studies, and so forth.

This book is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island state and beyond. Focusing on the new directions and trends of Taiwan literature, this edited book fits into Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and Asian studies.

"This book examines some interesting, significant types and aspects of Sinophone Taiwan fiction, as well as a number of prominent writers and representative works. Focusing on the narratives of the strange, it connects the trope of ghost haunting with Taiwan's complex ethnoscapes and historical, colonial trauma. In addition to investigating 'ghost island' narratives, it explores literary representations of magical nativism--including magical localism and translocalism. It offers an excellent, timely study on the important but understudied Sinophone Taiwan literature." -Yenna Wu, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside "This book travels in a new direction in Taiwanese fiction studies. Through the theme of 'ghost, ' this book links various historical phases, landscape features, and ethnic relations in response to the transformation of Taiwan's social environment and aesthetics of fiction. With a thought-provoking discourse, this book also provides a pleasurable reading experience." -Ming-ju Fan, Professor and Director of the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University "Writing from and of the margins, Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond examines the trope of Taiwan as a ghost island through the lens of zhiguai, the premodern Chinese concept of the strange or supernatural. The focus on marginal and liminal narratives facilitates a Sinophone reading of Taiwanese literature and culture beyond the dominant literary taxonomy of modern Chinese literature. Despite its specific focus, the book surveys Taiwanese literature with a study of texts by authors such as Pai Hsian-yung, Li Ang, Chu T'ien-hsin, Wu He, and Giddens Ko to propose a genealogy of ghost island literature as an alternative way of understanding Taiwan as a nation. This first single-authored book on Sinophone Taiwan, which intellectually treads on untouched terrains of a unique literary tradition, is a very welcome addition." -E.K. Tan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Stony Brook University; and author of Rethinking Chineseness "In Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond, Chia-rong Wu argues convincingly that the modern zhiguai genre offers Taiwan writers a way of engaging internal difference-particularly as it pertains to gendered and ethnic difference, as well as sites of historical trauma-while at the same time imagining modern Taiwan as a site of difference within a broader Chinese, or Sinophone, cultural imaginary" -Carlos Rojas, Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, and Arts of the Moving Image, Duke University See http: //www.cambriapress.com/books/9781604979213.cfm to read excerpts and for more information.

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches argues that what appeared to be a "genesis" of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the "splendid isolation" within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which "Free China" lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of "pure literature" and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution and the Cold War in 1971, the historian Joseph Levenson made the astute observation that China used to be cosmopolitan on account of Confucianism. At that time, the notion of China, much less Confucianism, as somehow being cosmopolitan may have surprised many of his readers, especially because so many conventional ideas about China-ranging from its "kith and kin" social structure to its purportedly eternal and monolithic state structure-seem to reflect a society that was the very antithesis of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, even now, or perhaps even more so now on account of growing Chinese nationalism, Han chauvinism, and global fears of a rising China, the idea of Chinese cosmopolitanism may strike many as ill conceived.Levenson, as with so much of his scholarship, was clearly on to something important. In fact, in the current academic climate it seems almost irresponsible not to address this. This book is therefore a much-needed pioneering attempt to explore the implications and possibilities of Levenson's potent observation regarding China in relation to the growing scholarship on cosmopolitanism around the world. It is an important intervention in both the current scholarship on modern China and the scholarship on cosmopolitanism in its global articulations.