Shuang Shen, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese

“Inter-imperiality” is a term most recently used by Laura Doyle to describe the overlapping, competition, and co-constitution of empires and imperialisms. It tries to imagine the literary field in terms of radical relationality, emphasizing messy dependencies instead of autonomous identities. I argue this perspective can shed light on the politics Sinophone popular literature, which was produced and circulated in a regional context involving Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, and other parts of Southeast Asia. My talk will draw for its example the romantic fictions written in the 1950s and 1960s, some of which were written for the USIA-funded magazine The Story Paper.