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Reframing Loss: Chinese Diaspora Identity in K. H. Lim’s Written in Black

  • SUVANNABHUMI
  • Abbr : SVN
  • 2023, 15(2), pp.131-152
  • DOI : 10.22801/svn.2023.15.2.131
  • Publisher : Korea Institute for ASEAN Studies
  • Research Area : Social Science > Area Studies > Southeast Asia
  • Received : February 3, 2023
  • Accepted : July 4, 2023
  • Published : July 31, 2023

Hannah Ming Yit Ho 1

1Universiti Brunei Darussalam; Fellow, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In analyzing the Chinese diaspora, this paper explores losses that are encountered within the family in the nation. It argues that increased social and spatial mobilities that contribute to losses can be reconfigured through the productive lens of supermobility, as Laurence J. C. Ma conceptualizes it. Supermobile identities are significant avenues to consider the way that losses traditionally associated with migration and assimilation are revisited in view of new flows of migration and identification. In examining K. H. Lim’s debut novel Written in Black (2014), this study addresses pathways from debilitating losses to productive losses journeyed by the family from the child’s perspective. It offers a critical analysis of the Anglophone Bruneian novel in terms of its exclusive portrayal of an ethnic Chinese family. Departing from a fixed notion of home as cultural and physical rootedness, it explores flexible identities that are tied to shifting concepts of belonging. Rather than a magnification of social and spatial losses, the analysis highlights the way that the literary imagination of ethnic Chinese in Brunei Darussalam accommodates progressive ideas of the agency and advancement of the Chinese diaspora as a supermobile community.

Citation status

Scopus Citation Counts (1) This is the result of checking the information with the same ISSN, publication year, volume, and start page between articles in KCI and the SCOPUS journals. (as of 2024-10-01)

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