Event

Through an examination of short stories from Malaysian-Chinese author Ng Kim Chew’s 2001 collection From Island to Island, in this talk I will reflect the taxonomical functions of criteria such language, ethnicity, and nationality, particularly as they inform contemporary discussions of Chinese, Sinophone, and Mahua (Malaysian-Chinese) literature. Several of Ng’s stories are set on remote islands and feature individuals who have been forcibly separated from their original linguistic or social environment, and as such they offer a vehicle for reflecting on some of the consequences of literary that arbitrarily prioritize one criterion (such as language or nationality) over others. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, I propose a taxonomical system that does not rely on a single criterion but rather attends to the dynamic interaction between a variety of different criteria, while using the resulting model to interrogate the naturalized conception of the family on which Wittgenstein himself relies.