 Hi everyone, my name is Kazima Bruno and I teach at SOAS Modules of Modern Chinese Literature, Culture and Translation. And this evening I'm going to share with you one of my research interests and talk of issues of territorial and linguistic parameters used in the definition of contemporary literatures. I'm going to look at a sample of works because we don't have a lot of time by Chinese migrant writers who have extended not only the geographic but also the linguistic and cultural delimitation of Chinese national literature. So for almost I think three decades even more than that now scholarly discourse has been attempting to break the national boundaries of literatures from around the world and especially of those literatures produced in a hyphenated context such as the British Chinese for example. So many have been advocating a narrative of multiple relations that goes beyond the paradigm of ethnicity and nationality. Oh, how can I, let me see if I can, yes. Edouard Grisson in this seminal book, The Poetics of Relations convincingly invites the reader to consider literature in general and Caribbean literature in particular in his case as the product of an intricate network of interactions among various cultures. Also François Lyonnais and Shoshume in 2005 invoked horizontal rather than vertical model of full minority culture, cultural formations and the relations with the majority culture. Another scholar is Michel Hier who points out that since several modern Chinese poets studied and wrote they developed close contact with the literature literatures from other countries and therefore convincing, convincingly she said that these poets have conceived a poetry that was hybrid in its literary reference as well as in its language. And also another person I refer to in my study is Jehan Ramazani who argues for a reconceptualization of 20th and 21st century poetry studies. And I quote he says, straddling not only the transatlantic divide but also the vast historical and cultural divisions between global north and south east and west end of quote. So we can certainly identify a transnational community composed by a London poet of Chinese heritage. But my question is does this mean that the question of who we are ethnically and nationally does not matter anymore today? And the poet Anna Chan she once introduced herself in this way. I was born in the far east of London in the enchanted land of Hackney. My dad's from China. My mother's from Dagonham. I am Dagonese. So you can see that the poet defines herself a little absurdly perhaps creating a new national identity of her own choosing. In the same way, the poet Yan Lian stated that he has changed from being a poet of China to a poet writing in Chinese to a poet writing in English. In fact, identity is a fluid concept formed in the crucible of politics, cultural legacy and language. And it is about having a sense of belonging that does not necessarily subscribe to the means of returning home and most importantly is not entirely defined by the subject but also by the wider context around her or him. So these literary works that I've been looking at were produced in London by poets of Chinese heritage who are foreign born or London native. And some of these works are written in English and some in Chinese. Some others in English to use Lin Yu Tang's another migrant Chinese writer definition that he used from perhaps a century ago. And the aim is to overview, discuss and engage broader theoretical discourses with poetry produced in the cultural capital of London, which has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, often breaking many of the boundaries of Chinese national and ethnic affiliation. So naturally I will not have time to introduce all of those points that I listed earlier on in one of my slides. But I have some guideline or guiding questions perhaps that I want to share with you. And these are how do these poets experience with London translate into literary production. Is there any reciprocal accommodation between their writings and the place where they have been produced? Another is what are the contextual circumstances, linguistic behavior and literary mediation in the works of these London poets of Chinese descent? And finally, is there a theoretical framework that is able to shed light on and accommodate such a varied corpus of works? So on the particular issue or hyphenated literature, quite a wide range of studies and anthologies is available on Chinese American literature. So much so that at the end of the 1990s, the scholar Shanmei Ma individuated, I quote, a current academic fixation, and of quote, on literature in English from the so-called Third World and from minorities within the so-called First World. At the same time, however, he laments that literature written in Chinese by Chinese immigrants in the USA is studied by a near handful of sinologists, despite, I quote, the immense Chinese readership at home and abroad, end of quote. And concludes, finally, that language rather than historical colonization is the key to a text inclusion or exclusion in postcolonial discourse. Conversely, according to my findings, very little interest is demonstrated in the works written in both Chinese and English in the UK. And even less has been produced on poets of Chinese heritage in London. And this absence is quite perplexed to me because not just because it is in opposition with what happened in the USA, but because it may point to the danger that the uniqueness of these writers' contribution to English and Chinese letters will be at best underappreciated at worst lost. So for example, I mean, this is just an example, I was very disappointed to notice that in a book that bears the promising title of voicing of the crossing, the impact of written on writers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, published in the year 2000, no writer of Chinese descent is mentioned. Moreover, among the generally not much known London poets of Chinese descent write in English, many of the authors that I have been investigating for years now are only partially and anyway, very rarely included in any UK major Chinese department libraries. So how is language related to Chinese? For a long time, the written Chinese language has been working as a kind of glue that binds, literates Chinese together as a building block of the Chinese imagined community, a strong sense of membership in a unique discourse community. And this, especially a scholar by the name of the two women, has explained in this article, quite influential article, entitled The Living Tree, The Center as the Periphery. But this was based on the presumption that a Chinese diaspora had to speak Chinese and in the reverse presumption that foreigners, especially Westerners, cannot possibly ever fully learn to speak Chinese. So there is a historian who in 2013 points out how the dominant imagery of a single Chinese diaspora actually serves political strategies of identity that continuously drove back to the nation center. And another famous scholar is called Jin Zhu. She knows that a tolerated essentialism, she says, uses the notion of the mother tongue to support expressions of cultural belonging with the native speaker as its center. And in fact, the emotional investment of the Chinese in the in the Chinese language for those who have known it all their lives is synonymous with being Chinese. So this is what I want to avoid this kind of what she calls tolerated essentialism of the mother tongue and using that language as a verb, as something that has agency in meaning making as some social linguists have argued. So London writers of Chinese descent may be experiencing a state of linguistic estrangement. No matter if they're writing Chinese or English, their discordant usage of language displays a resounding xenophony. For example, let us look at work at work by Hannah Low, who adds more nuances to the depictions of a creolized relational concept of home that I was mentioning in the beginning as a space that simultaneously incorporates that the year and there. And so she was born in 1976 in Britain to an Afro-Jamaican Chinese father and a white English mother. So Hannah Low published her semi-autobiographical collection entitled Chick in 2013. And she and here she narrates her catchable her inheritance through two main tropes, her father's gambling habit that she sees as a familiar tradition transmitted to him from the Shanghainese grandfather and of food of a cultural signif as a cultural signifier. And so as these these stanzas excerpted from the poem The Three Treasures illustrate England downstairs in a rocking chair, Nana rocking with her playing cards, six and toffee, tepid tea, Jamaican fried chicken in the kitchen, big snout in the stew pot, breakfast pan of salt fish, IK, china in the one-turned skin, gold songbird on the brittle porcelain, pink pagoda silk city, England for the English in graffiti, on the roundabout and bass shelters, pleaser on TV. Jamaica on the phone at 3 a.m. my father's back home boys through fuzz and crack, my friend long time no see, china in the cantonese he knew but wouldn't speak in letters staffed in shoeboxes, ink stick, calligraphy, china in his slender bones in coral birds of stichu bamboo, china in an origami butterfly that few. So we can see already from these excerpts that paging English heteroglossia and multiple cultural backgrounds within the London context are the telling features of a relational poetics stanza by stanza you see the poet condensate the multiple linguistic ethnic and cultural dimensions into the space of a single building her home and so the patois of Jamaican cantonese and English is used to set the person's familial space with food and objects named in different languages composing this multi-story building of cultural affiliation. So the transcription of a familial non-standard diction is able to convey the language of intimacy if you like it is in such discordant use of language that words become carriers of personal histories reflecting the intertwining of stories memories and voices of mixed provenance. Paging English is only one but widely recognized discontent language. It has been praised as a writing practice that can enhance expressivity by authors as different as George Bernard Shaw and Otto Jesperson and in the particular variety of chinglish it was eloquently advocated by the literary polymath Li Newtang as I said in the beginning in the 1930s and it has been also used in mainly London authors of Chinese heritage such as Anna Loewa but also Gene Meiling, Jennifer Wong and Xiaoluo. Many contemporary writers such as Doc Fu Chen, Yang Lian, Hong Beilio, and Shen Waikuan, Jennifer Wong and Xiaoluo are also able to interchangeably live in the cultural capitals of Beijing, London, Berlin, New York, Hong Kong or Paris. So their work presents us with bodies, families, communities and nations connoted by the fluidity and diversity of contemporary life and I see them as complicating the unilateral relationship between belonging and location. So in many cases the home left behind does not trigger nostalgia but is instead perceived as a confining space that wither inspiration. So there is actually a scholar called Carlos Rojas who has routinely elaborated in his book Home Sickness where he says that he presents some instances in modern Chinese literature where home itself becomes a space of illness and consequently home sickness comes to be understood as a condition not caused by a longing for home but rather by an excessive proximity to it and you can imagine that this is very often the case of exile poets. So born and raised in post-British occupation, Singapore, Stephanie Doc Fu Chen adopts a post-colonial approach. She has populated the London scene from 2009 to 2013 and in 2012 she won the UK Farago Slam Championships and in the same year she represented the UK in the European Slam Championship in Antwerp coming in third place and in 2013 again she represented the UK in the Poetry Slam World Cup in Paris being shortlisted for the semi-finals and she participated at the Edinburgh Free Fringe in 2013 and in general she was very active in poetry fringe festivals and slam poetry events all over London performing in all sorts of venues and her poetry almost exclusively deals with political and social issues and I think I put here yes on her website so on her website she writes she describes herself in these two ways the first is long story short she writes awkward 20-something from the Far East moves to London for the first time to find her place in history and the world while dodging riot cops, spies, bailiffs, orientalists and haters she will try to make sense of the bizzareness of living in the so-called centre of the world in the 21st century through poems and stories hilarity anxious and then she writes long story long in 2009 Stephanie Chan got off a plane at Eastrow joining millions of colonial subjects through her history who felt the need to live in the same town as their queen join her in the strangeness years of her life as the gallivants around London attempting to take its men, eat its women and steal its jobs she explores what it means to be foreign what it means to be home and why the hell everyone from everywhere feels the need to go away to find themselves so this kind of narrative as you can see shows how travel can merge with a history of colonial discourse constructing the English-Chinese distinction as native and foreigners it addresses issues of cultural inequity, engages with identity and political themes and uses a demystifying tone to question English authority and Stephanie Darkfoot Chan displays confidence in her home ground because places and also speeches in London and the fact that she has represented the UK in European fringe festivals endorses all of this so like for lower and other poets too also for Chan her own cultural context is by definition hybrid in an interview with 2009 UK national poetry slam champion Pete the temp Chan talks of how she grew up reading best sellers of London children writer Enid maybe Blighton and how she took her nickname Darkfoot from the protagonist of In the Children's Story, Daggy Darkfoot by English writer Dick King Smith so by affirming the need to go away to find themselves the psychological space of elsewhere is for Chan London the UK and yet London with its colonial history of power is also the home that the postcolonial subject claims as their own this poem here the 29th poem the 29th bus is given as a setting and a stroke of London's multicultural population this is a bus that traverse London from north in woodgreen to the center in Trafalgar Square and it is wrote by I put the Grand Pete Turkish man or the Spanish Queen and because she writes it is a little known rule on the 29 that there has to be a member of every continent represented on the bus at all times or it will explode and 100 years from now long after London has crumbled to the ground the buildings have corroded away and the lions on Trafalgar Square have finally acted and left for warmer climate the 29 will still be running so a similar relationship between the persona and the city of London is described also in these other poem L and D you know what I mean and here places become personified or maybe people have become places because she writes hey haringy I'm sorry I stole your lighter hey Brixton I'm sorry I missed you last Sunday night so the persona who is a postcolonial subject is susceptible to the lure of the city and wants to be recognized as a forming part of it because she writes take a picture to preserve me I want to be remembered on these streets full of faded footprints of footprints of minor gods from the past 600 years tell me how we have been making history since the day we got here but towards the end of the poem the relationship between the subject and these are lowering center is somewhat inverted it says back London it was never about you you were never a destination just a vehicle to greater things you are everybody somewhere else you're just a dude who let the world tattoo themselves all over his body and I am the bad idea gap here Chinese calligraphy on your lower back that you thought meant peace but really says otters but you can't quite bring yourself to get rid of me you know that right so I made a misinterpretations and bad translations the cultural interactions entertained by the postcolonial subject with the colonizer although remaining superficial and exploitative still leaves a mark on the body making it hybrid making it listen as she writes in these other poem the foreign poem keep your deep knowledge of your country of my country I don't even care if you haven't you've never heard of it before just drop your assumption read my lips and listen when we speak so the complication of the cultural interaction in in the creole eyes multiply intersected subject resides in enjoying being changed and she writes I like the way I tweak my accent choose my clothes and cut my hair but these constitutes her predicament to become the other wherever she goes since now a being at home does not guarantee a shared identity because when I go back she she writes when I go back home as people stop and steer muttering just another middle class hassle corrupted by the west and or quote and even more poignantly not only west and east become irreconcilable irreconcilable but even the inscription of mainland China as the other is reason for discrimination but these days I am more likely to get back back home for now for how I speak chinese see my mandarins tainted by a page intro every generation there is a new culture to discover to blame to hate but who is them and who is we and on and on and on it goes this constant litany of foreign go home foreign go home foreign go home so let me just ups draw some conclusion or our glosses if you like um first of all among the london poets of chinese heritage there is no clear shared sense of shared identity they arrived in the uk in different historical moments and from various geographical regions so the poets who reached london at a later stage of their writing career and those who have been living here for most of their lives uh might not have actually common background and the uh claim uh claimed chinese identity uh may in fact be something consider considerably a different from one another uh in two way means influential proposition that i mentioned earlier on the changing meaning of being chinese entails a new cultural space that his youth writes transcends the ethnic territorial linguistic and religious boundaries that normally define chineseness and their quote and then in such a concept of cultural china however to winning recognizes three symbolic universes the first consists of mainland china taiwan on kong and singapore um that is uh societies that are populated predominantly by cultural and ethnic chinese and then he recognizes the second a sphere that consists of chinese communities throughout the world and then finally the third symbolic universe consists of all those who do not have any direct connection to chineseness but who i quote try to understand china intellectually end of quote and finally also bring a chance in her study of chinese national identity among the virtual communities identifies four different chinese nations instead of three as she says the official chinese nation which comprises the peoples republic of china citizens the peoples republic of china's hand nation the prc and the compatriots of taiwan on kong and mcow then we have chinese who live in other parts of the world but against these propositions i argue in fact that many more chinese and respective chinese identities can be found in the specificity of every intersection between the subject and each of her geographic geographical context so to conclude the only concrete common denominator among these forces that they all have experience living in and writing in london and methodologically this implies the adoption of multiculturalism framework which has allowed me to ground these poetic works locally in london as an action scene of writing rather than in relation to demographic data or the irretrievable point of origin and equally important is to conceive the london location as unfixed as the point of origin how am i going am i going too too too late so okay i think i i probably stop here thank you very much for your attention okay thank you dr bruno we'll now take some questions from the q&a box and every question coming in so far will be answered live so the first question for dr bruno is what's the role of the language in identity crisis for chinese descent writers in uk and abroad in general yes as i try to to to showcase here the language is much more flexible than if they when you compare them to writers who have remained in the in the prc and by this i mean that is much richer of heterodoxia so you can see that you have barriers not only various languages for example english and chinese put together in the same text but also there are various cases of vernacular english or vernacular chinese that is the familial version of those languages so you may have you know expressions that are used just within the memory of the of the personal the subject thank you the second question is for jenny from sky hi jenny i'm interested in the ma korean studies what do you hope to gain from your ma yeah um so just to reiterate i don't know if everyone was here when i wrote in the chat i'm jenny um i'm the student ambassador here uh so i asked on ma japanese studies um and i also did my ba um in japanese and korean at so i asked from 2016 to 2020 so i've been here for five years now um and in terms of my what i want to get out of my ma i'm looking at going into academics anyway um i'm actually i've been accepted for my phd that i start in september um also it's um uh yeah they can't get rid of me really um but my field of interest specifically is um to do with uh the representation of people with disabilities in japan um and the uh changes and developments in accessibility technology in japanese businesses over time um so specifically what i have got out of my ma i guess is another thing i could add to that is um because i mean i've only got a week of a week of term left so i'm pretty much done at this point um apart from dissertation obviously uh it's been a lot different than i thought it would be it's definitely a step up from ba but i think it's just infinitely more interesting and more you can delve a lot deeper into the subjects that you're interested in and when you pick the certain modules that um lecturers tend to be more passionate about it tends to be their kind of their own personal research um that they're bringing to the lectures so um it it's honestly it's such an incredible experience and even if you end up going into a career that's completely separate and seems completely unrelated just the skills and the kind of analytical viewpoint um and the kind of non completely detached from any kind of eurocentrism um is a lot of the syllabus it's so i think it's it's definitely worth exploring and um it's a good place to study east asian languages and cultures i hope that answers your question great thank you jenny um they don't appear to be any more questions submitted during the talk so maybe one minute we'll hold to see if anyone wants to send in a question now or if not we can recall it today ah so one other question for jenny hi jenny curious what your peers pursue post-ma if they do not stay in academia and what kind of support is there for post-grad students i'm currently considering the ma chinese studies program hi yeah so um my peers from what i've um from what i know at the minute i think a lot of people are still undecided because of the pandemic obviously um that it's kind of changing up a lot of people's plans um i know that some people plan to find um jobs within kind of more research oriented positions uh institutions um in japan and korea from what i know um i've got a friend who's got a job lined up teaching in um teaching english in japan um as soon as she's allowed in uh and a friend in who's currently doing a distance ma well she's doing the ma at saas but is uh lined up to do a phd at um you have to excuse me i can't remember the name of the university but it's a university in beijing um that she did uh ba japanese and chinese studies with me at um at saas and then did an ma and now is moving out there so there's definitely a a range of options um i know people who are kind of doing a more uh translation oriented route um who are kind of using their degree to use that as there's quite a few translation courses that can help you get uh practice and the kind of more theory behind it um specifically i'm thinking of uh japanese to english and english to japanese but i'm sure that there's similar programs in um chinese and obviously korean um yeah i think there's a real variety and i think just the opportunities in the kind of network you'll be able to gain at saas that not everyone in your class is going to be on your course um that there's going to be people from all over the world in all kind of walks of life or ages or um genders ethnicities sexualities there's honestly such a diverse experience you're never going to meet two people who are like exactly the same um so yeah i hope that answers your question um i think there's another question for me about the uh quality of teaching at saas um i think it's i think all everyone's adaptive well i think obviously it's a struggle switching from being there physically at nine a.m to sitting on a laptop instead but i think that the lecturers and students we've all kind of adapted to it together um and i think that the teaching is just as good if not you know just exactly the same really it's the standard hasn't dropped um it's definitely still there's a lot of access to online journals saas has a lot of kind of resources in terms of um chinese japanese and korean uh language databases via the library um so if you were doing kind of research that you think you'd need to go physically in for you can do it online or there's like a scan and send service um lecturers have lots of office hours that they are you know constantly available um so i don't feel that the the standards change that much um at all really since since going online um i think now we've kind of all settled into it that um it's working pretty well great thank you jenny one more question for dr bruno um is there a difference in the way writers from the prc and writers from other chinese speaking countries like malaysia and singapore related the concept of chineseness in the works you have studied yes i believe um there is a difference for each of these uh writers i have been studying um until the way they conceive being chinese and what makes for them chineseness um and uh it is it is as i said towards the end of my talk it is very much um um individual um according to their own experience their their places you know it's it's all it's so varied because you need to include the interactions between all these factors in order to you know define their um their own version of chineseness uh but definitely uh you know there is a big difference between uh the country where they come from but also the countries and the places that they have um gone in between and then finally also the life that they can use here in london you know doc fuchan for example she she had a very um popular life if you like but um she was uh populating squatting you know she was of a certain social status she was engaging with certain people but perhaps people of other generations have different engagement socially and and politically and linguistically too great thank you okay well we have time for one more question i think and the question is would you be interested in looking into other writers of chinese descent in other parts of the uk such as manchester absolutely i think that uh i would love to look at um other writers of chinese heritage in rural areas i think it would be an interesting um uh direction for my research but you know being in london um is is is a special gives me a special advantage because there are so many writers and so many different countries and ling and languages concentrated in this area um so for me it's easier to uh also contact them and and um you know find material and uh interview them and uh know the know them whereas if i have to research um writers in a rural area um either i know in advance where to look or it's quite difficult but yes definitely i am very interested in looking also in other in other um cities and also in rural areas great thank you so much right so i guess all this left says thank you for everyone for attending thank you to jenny for helping out with questions and thank you dr brunner for giving the talk today i hope you enjoyed the taste session and hope to see you soon as us thank you amand thank you everybody bye thank you bye