Decolonizing Comparative Literature: Reading Across Southeast Asian Literatures (Asia in Transition, 30)

This book promotes a novel and nuanced understanding of how the practices of comparative literature have engaged with the politics of nation-building in postcolonial Southeast Asia. It provides readings of Southeast Asian literatures in a comparative context, demonstrating how such readings enable texts to engage with issues connected to postcolonial nation-building across the region. Such issues include social exclusion, urbanization and environmental destruction, post-war traumas, animal narratives, migration, identity, gender, and literature, and politics. In doing so, this book moves beyond traditional comparative literature which is overwhelmingly rooted in Western literature and scholarship. To this end, it extends an invitation to decolonize comparative literature as a discipline. Few studies have attempted to examine the alternative non-western literary traditions that emerge from this specific Asian region, and so this book presents a rich combination of theoretical and critical studies that contribute to advancing the discipline of comparative literature in Southeast Asian geographies. It is relevant to scholars working in Asian literature, comparative literature, and in postcolonial frameworks in philosophy and cultural studies.

Chi P. Pham is Tenured Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi. She received her first Ph.D. degree in Literary Theory in Vietnam and her second Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside (USA). She is the secretary of Association for the Study of Literature and Ecology in ASEAN (ASLE-ASEAN). She published both Vietnamese and English about literature and politics in Vietnam.

Jose Monfred C. Sy is an assistant professor of Philippine studies in the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong. He has published on social movements, anticolonialism and decoloniality, environmental humanities, and children’s literature in both Filipino and English.

Nguyen Thi Nhu Trang is Tenured Associate Professor and Head of the Literary Theories Department at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. Her research and teaching focus on modern Russian literature. She is also interested in cultural and urban studies and has written about the writings and films of Vietnamese immigrants in Europe and the US. She has published extensively in both Vietnamese and English.