Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories in Nanyang Studies and Mahua Literature

Abstract

This essay situates resource extraction politics in the twin formation of Malayan intellectual and literary thought as embodied by Nanyang Studies and Mahua literature. Rather than “Chinese-Malayan,” “Sino-Malay,” and “Sinophone Malaysian,” I define “Mahua literature” as Chinese-language literature from the Malay Peninsula, along the rich tin-belt stretching from Ranong and Phuket to Bangka and Belitung. I argue that its coinage was an anti-colonial response to Malaya’s export-oriented colonial economy at the height of the international tin trade during the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, I trace the intellectual origins of Nanyang Studies, not to its actual founding in Singapore in 1940, but to its founder Hsu Yun-Tsiao’s experience of the central peninsula and ports, as recounted in his Patani diaries (1933). For centuries, southern Thailand and northern Malaya experienced Chinese migration due to the tin trade, and their development under Siamese and British spheres of influence and local Malay rule can be conceived as a geohistorical unit. It was only the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909 that formed the present-day border between Malaysia and Thailand, and how we now conceive the national boundaries between Mahua and Taihua literatures. But the long history of the tin trade’s Phuket-Penang sea route and Patani-Perak-Kedah overland routes not only influenced the internationalist, cosmopolitan, and anti-colonial thinking of Hsu’s work, but also facilitated his recruitment to teach the descendants of Chinese laborers and capitalists in the first place. Nanyang Studies’s historical consciousness of borderlands and coastlines contains non-national strategies for intellectual decolonization within Mahua literary development.

此篇论文聚焦南洋研究和马华文学的存现形式，将资源开采的政治置入马来亚学术和文学思想的双重形构中。有别于“华裔/华侨马来亚”（Chinese-Malayan）、“土生华人”（Sino-Malay）、与“华语语系马来西亚”（Sinophone Malaysian）的论述，我将“马华文学”界定为马来半岛上的华文文学，其生产地散布在从拉农（Ranong）和 普吉（Phuket） 到 邦加（Bangka）和勿里洞（Belitung）的锡矿带上。我意欲论述“马华文学”的概念创始于1920与1930年代国际锡矿贸易的鼎盛时期，乃针对马来亚作为殖民地外向型经济体的一种反殖实践。再者，我追溯南洋研究的发展脉络，将其思想源头同发起人许云樵于半岛中部和海港的经验相连结（其1933年的《北大年日记》有所记述），而不再将南洋学会于1940年在新加坡创办看成此一区域研究的发端。数百年来，泰南和北马因在地的锡矿业而吸引华人移民。据此，两地的发展因处于暹罗与英国的势力圈内，以及马来皇室的统治之下，而可被视作一个史地单位。1909 年的英国-暹罗条约促就了今天马来西亚和泰国的疆界，并引致我们构想马华文学和泰华文学的国家边界。然而，服务锡矿业的普吉---槟城的海运航线和北大年---霹雳---吉打的陆路交通线路具有悠久的历史。这段历史不仅影响了许氏国际主义与世界主义的反殖观念，更在最初促使他招收华工和华商的后嗣进行教学。南洋研究关涉边疆地带和海岸线的历史意识包含了解殖思想的非国家策略，可用于重新考量马华文学的发展进程.