Ny avhandling om arbetarlitteratur från Singapore och Kina

 I morse deltog jag, via nätet, i Luka Lei Zhangs disputation vid Nanyang Technical University i SIngapore, där hon försvarade sin avhandling "Modes of Production of Working-Class Literature from Asia".

Innehållet sammanfattar hon såhär:

In recent years, we are witnessing a growing interest and urgency in the exploration of working-class literature. However, systematical and historical investigations of working-class literature are still rare in Asian countries. This dissertation aims to fill the gap by studying working-class literature from modern Singapore and China. By examining contemporary Singaporean and Chinese working-class authors in a comparative light, this dissertation presents an “Asia from below”, discussing literary texts produced by socioeconomically and culturally underrepresented working-class writers. Moreover, by focusing on transnational Asian working-class writers operating under the conditions of rampant capitalism, the thesis goes beyond the national frameworks applied in many if not most literary studies projects. The dissertation presents working-class writers with diverse literary purposes and styles and helps us to recognize that working-class writers and working-class writings are not fixed categories but sites of mediation, negotiation and contestation.

The dissertation is split into two parts. Part one takes working-class literature from Singapore as its focus. By analyzing works by Chong Han (1945–), Tan Kok Seng (1939–), and several present-day migrant-worker writers, a basic historical overview of working-class literature in Singapore is presented. In this context, different possibilities and limits under various “production modes” are discussed. In each of the three cases, I reflect on particular historical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic features that make the specific predicaments of working-class writers visible. I also problematize various aspects of the academic discourse on working-class literature at different stages in Singaporean history. My account of the writers in part one is intended as a step toward a more comprehensive and encompassing, and so-far missing, history of working-class writing in Singapore. 

Part two moves to working-class literature from contemporary China. Here, too, I discuss different “production modes” of three Chinese working-class writers, namely the Chinese Communist Party-groomed worker writer Hu Wanchun (1929-1998), the neoliberal market-oriented Zhang Lijia (1964-), and a group of rather neglected present-day underground working-class poets and their journal Worker Poetry. I argue that the latter open up a new space for Chinese working-class literature and a possible alternative horizon with an internationalist imagination and a different “mode of production” of working-class literature. Written under different ideologies and published with different motivations, all the texts studied in this dissertation reflect historical transformations in the political struggles of the working-class.

Jag har följt avhandlingens framväxt på nära håll, inte minst när Luka var gästdoktorand vid Malmö Universitet, och anser att den ger flera väldigt viktiga bidrag till arbetarlitteraturforskningen. Nu ser jag fram mot att följa Lukas vidare karriär som forskare.