Popular Literature in the Inter-imperial Space of Hong Kong and Singapore/Malaya

Abstract

This article addresses the neglect toward popular literary networks with Hong Kong in the Cold War period by influential Mahua scholars. Aiming to make way for a more robust discourse of cultural politics in tandem with a regional conceptualization of Sinophone cultural production, the article proposes to understand popular forms such as romance fiction as arising from and coconstituting a regional Sinosphere that can only be understood, following Laura Doyle's recent study, as inter-imperial. Offering a reading of the Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang's romantic fiction and immigrant stories, I show how the stories signify a geopolitical reckoning with the Cold War patterning of the world. This perspective offers more ways for us to evaluate how the regional literary field intersected with the Cold War beyond the singular defense of its “literariness.”