Sinophone literatures from Southeast Asia have long been doubly marginalised: they have been deemed ‘sectional’ literatures, produced in languages other than the national language, and thus for consumption by minority populations only. At the same time, they were regarded as derivative texts, far removed from the centre of cultural production in China. At least with regard to the latter aspect, the situation has changed dramatically with the rise of the Sinophone as a critical paradigm, which has recently been declared an ‘Idea of the Decade’ by the American Comparative Literature Association. With an outpouring of new, innovative research and a flurry of publications, Southeast Asia has very much become the centre of critical inquiry in Chinese literary studies.

Alison Groppe's timely new book is an important addition to this rapidly growing literature. Importantly, Groppe's well-researched study moves beyond the larger horizon of the ‘Sinophone’ by zooming in onto one particularly vibrant literature, that produced by authors born in colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia. Giving sustained attention to authors such as Ng Kim Chew, Li Yongping, and Zhang Guixing, Groppe asks how Sinophone Malaysian writers position themselves with a view to three major nodes of identity formation, namely, the imaginary homeland ‘China’, the vibrant cultural and intellectual world of Taiwan, and Malaysia — space of memory and roots, affiliations and imagination, longing as well as trauma. ‘Sinophone Malaysian literature,’ says Groppe, ‘grows from a complex web of attachments’ (p. 20); the links of the writers discussed here to Malaysia, Taiwan, and China ‘are not accepted as “given” but are subject to scrutiny, conceptualisation, even interrogation’ (p. 12).

Sinophone Malaysian literature consists of seven chapters and a conclusion. The Introduction addresses the terminological and conceptual problems raised by the Sinophone, in both English and Chinese, which eventually points to questions of identity and identification. As a critical concept, the Sinophone, or Huayu, has the advantage of highlighting conscious linguistic choices and positions, without however subsuming the resulting literary production under a hegemonic, China-centric world view. It acknowledges that Sinophone literature in Southeast Asia coexists (and, to some degree, interacts) with multiple other local languages, official or non-official; and it disrupts the claim of congruence between nation-states, languages, and literatures.

Chapter 2 provides a good historical overview of modern Sinophone Malaysian literature (Mahua wenxue) since its inception in the 1920s, based on a synthesis of much of the existing research in both English and Chinese. This chapter will prove especially useful in the classroom. The third chapter, ‘Language, place, and identity’, places the book's theoretical core concerns in historical perspective. The creation of a distinctive literary voice has been a central issue in Sinophone Malaysian literature since at least the 1940s. Realist authors from the 1950s and 1960s pursued a strategy of colloquialisation, which allowed them to express local sensibilities and create cultural identity by incorporating vernacular elements into the literary language. This strategy has come under attack since the 1990s by authors and critics with modernist inclinations, most notably Ng Kim Chew. In Ng's eyes, the heavy reliance on colloquial hybridity and an abstract ‘Chinese culture’ has in fact contributed to the provincialisation of Sinophone Malaysian literature. Yet, as Groppe shows, ‘on a fundamental level Ng's ultimate aspirations for the literary language of Sinophone Malaysian writing are not so different from what earlier writers attempted and sought’ (p. 73). Despite claims to the contrary, contemporary authors such as Ng operate within the same constellation of language, locality, and identity; resistance against essentialised cultural identities and the search for a space of their own remains a crucial issue in Sinophone Malaysian literature.

The next four chapters present case studies that scrutinise the works of some of the most influential and acclaimed Sinophone Malaysian writers. Chapter 4 focuses on Ng Kim Chew's fiction and especially the element of intertextuality in his stories, at least three of which deal with the ‘Southbound’ Chinese writer Yu Dafu and his disappearance in wartime Indonesia. In chapter 5, Groppe reads the fiction of Li Tianbao from the angle of pop culture — and in particular Mandarin film songs, first popularised in the 1940s and 1950s — as a nostalgic access point to a Southern Chinese circuit of cultural production and consumption. The sixth chapter turns to Li Yongping and his construction of home and self, especially with reference to the sometimes violent history of Chinese migration to and settlement in Southeast Asia. Chapter 7 takes up a particularly traumatising part of the Chinese experience in the region by scrutinising the fictional treatment of the Communist insurrections by a number of authors, including Ng Kim Chew, Li Yongping, Zhang Guixing, and Li Zishu, accounts that provide alternative (‘vernacular’) histories that pierce through a streamlined, official master narrative.

It is in this context that Groppe notes that two of the writers she discusses, Li Yongping and Zhang Guixing, both natives of Borneo, ‘seem to identify more with Borneo as a place than with Malaysia as a state and to consider Borneo rather than Malaysia their homeland’ (p. 249). This observation, rather inconspicuous as it appears in the book's final chapter, seems to raise questions that ultimately refer us back to the central problems underlying the concept of the Sinophone: If locality ultimately outweighs the nation-state, how accurately can a label such as ‘Sinophone Malaysian’ characterise the literature under discussion here? The politics of sub-national and regional identities and their implications for our understanding of literary and cultural practice in the region are only beginning to come into the purview of Sinophone studies. These questions are only partly addressed here and go unanswered, but Sinophone Malaysian literature provides us with the much-needed basis for further explorations of the literary and cultural landscape of Southeast Asia. This insightful, detailed, and knowledgeable study will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture, diasporic literature, and Southeast Asian studies.