Neutralizing English: Han Suyin and the language politics of Third World literature

ABSTRACT

The writings of Han Suyin during her sojourn in British Malaya from the 1950s to 1960s are a rich archive for understanding how the Cold War’s impact on postcolonial nation-building contributed to the remaking of English as a supposedly neutral language. Han styled herself as a spokesperson for China to the English-speaking world during the early decades of communist rule. Her writings arguably helped to fashion English as a transparent medium for representing Asia, a conception of language that informs global literary publishing today. Yet her work, which was influenced by her participation in the Afro-Asian Writers Conferences organized in the wake of the 1955 Bandung Conference, as well as her experience of living in Malaya during the colonial counter-insurgency against communists, also offers insights on how English’s neutrality ought to be understood in relation to forestalled Third World movements and racialized antagonisms in postcolonial nations.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• Han Suyin
• race
• Malaysia
• Third World literature
• world anglophone literature

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Melissa Lee-Sundlov and JesseSundlov for housing me during one of my research trips to Boston.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My thanks to Alex Tickell for suggesting that I explore the relevance of this novel to my argument, and to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing’s anonymous reviewer for the suggestion of strengthening this point.

2. In the wake of this anti-feudal movement, writers and intellectuals promoted the use of written vernacular Chinese and associated it with promoting education and literacy.

Additional information

Funding

Support for research at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston was provided in part by a Doctoral Research Travel Grant by the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2012 and travel stipend by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore in 2015.

Notes on contributors

Fiona Lee

Fiona Lee is lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she researches and teaches in the fields of postcolonial/global anglophone literatures. She has published peer-reviewed essays on Malaysian literature, art, and cinema in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Text, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and the Journal of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.