Mapping identity and place in Yongping Li’s The End of the River

ABSTRACT

This article offers to postcolonial literary studies a case study of Borneo grappling with its colonial legacy and cultural identity by exploring the dynamic interplay between place and identity in Yongping Li’s two-volume novel, Da He Jin Tou (The End of the River). Using a theoretical framework rooted in postcolonial geo-humanities, including the concept of place in postcolonialism, Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of “topophilia”, and Robert Tally’s literary cartography, the article argues that Li’s mapping of Borneo as a dynamic interactive space offers entry into a process of affective identification that transcends national borders and ethnicity. To achieve this, the article first contextualizes Li’s Borneo writing within a postcolonial spatial framework, and then proceeds to analyse the novel, highlighting a meeting between Tuan’s humanistic geography as related to place and affective bond, and Tally’s literary mapping of spatiality to demonstrate Li’s identification with the textured and affectively charged Borneo.

KEYWORDS:

• Maps
• identity
• affective site
• Borneo
• Yongping Li
• The End of the River

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Da He Jin Tou (The End of the River) is currently unavailable in English translation, therefore, all quotations from this novel are my translations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Project (Youth Fund Project) [21YJC752021]; Fudamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2021ECNU-YYJ003].

Notes on contributors

Xiaoling Yao

Xiaoling Yao is a lecturer in English at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. She obtained her PhD in English literature from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include memory, narrative identity, and spatiality. Routledge recently published her monograph Conrad, Autobiographical Remembering, and the Making of Narrative Identity, and her articles have appeared in journals such as English Studies, Neohelicon, Conradian, and The Explicator.