跨國流動的華文文學 ― 台灣文學場域裡的？在台馬華文學？

Abstract

This paper provides a critical account of the development of Mahua literature in Taiwan since the 1960’s. As a diasporic literature, MLiT [Mahua (Chinese Malaysian) literature in Taiwan] exemplifies the mobility and transnationality of new or emergent Chinese literatures in the Pacific Rim. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Mahua poets in Taiwan joined forces with local Modernist poets to actualize their “Chinese imagination,” claiming their stay in the island a cultural return. From the late 1980’s onwards, a younger generation of Mahua writers have emerged in Taiwan literary scene. Travelling to Taiwan for further study in higher education, they have instead established themselves by winning prominent literary prizes and hence forming a community of MLiT. However, while Taiwan serves as a flexible and resourceful literary environment for the transnational or diasporic or expatriate producers of literatures in Chinese, the position of MLiT is quite ambiguous. On the one hand, critics of Taiwanese literature complain that writers of MLiT tend to write more about the world that they have left than the place that they live at the moment. On the other hand they are accused, by Malaysian critics of Mahua literature, of misrepresenting their equatorial homeland. Such a (dis)position of the writers of MLiT provokes reflections on the transnationality of contemporary Taiwanese literature and new Chinese literatures at large.