混血（語）化脈絡中的華語語系研究

Sinophone Studies through the Lens of Creolization

華語語系研究過去數年間異軍突起。此學科取道華人移民史、國族問題意識、語言流變、和後殖民理論等施力點，解構以中國性為想像基準的文學暨文化史觀、地理觀。本文循此提問模式，思考此學科如何從東西方學界借力使力，來理解南洋華人殖民網路中的混血（語）化現象。首先分梳觀念上的問題，其後淺析上世紀初新華知識份子的《海峽華人雜誌》，和菲律賓華人的《吻手》系列影片。南洋土生觀點與西方學界混血（語）化經驗或有不同，實則相互對照；綜而觀之，期以厚實華語語系學科處理族裔、語言等問題時的理論深度和彈性。

Over the past few years, Sinophone studies-pioneered by U.S.-based scholars Shumei Shih and David Der-wei Wang-has led many scintillating intellectual debates across the Pacific, over the discourse of modern and contemporary Sinitic-language literatures and cultures. This emergent field gains salience for its committed critique of an enduring genealogy of Chinese literary and cultural discourse that has long valorized the ideological grip of Chineseness and China-centrism. It does so, specifically, by foregrounding the jarring realities of Chinese migrations, the problematic of ethno-nationalism, the diversity of Sinitic languages, and the historical sensibility of postcolonial criticism. This essay takes up this mode of critique to explore the common but under-theorized phenomena of creolization in Nanyang’s transcolonial interethnic cultural networks, with creolized, or peranakan, Chinese taking the center stage. I begin by discussing how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Straits Chinese elites of Singapore take advantage of the Anglicized discursive space of Straits Chinese Magazine (1897-1907) to re-fashion the meanings of Chinese in relation to their multiracial colonial milieu. Turning to the present-day Philippines, I next analyze how the multilingual Mano Po film series recast Chinese Filipino (or Tsinoy) cultures in light of the colonial history of Chinese Mestizos, in an attempt to write the Chinese back to the mainstream Pinoy culture. In a comparative dialogue, the talk highlights the Nanyang peranakan perspective so to provide the text and contextual ground to Sinophone articulations of ethnoracial relations, heteroglossia, and postcoloniality.