Popular Nanyang: re-thinking Chinese cultures in post-war Singapore and Malaya/Malaysia

This special issue aims to rethink the significance of “popular culture” for Singapore and Malayan/Malaysian Chinese studies, and more broadly, for modern Chinese cultural studies. Located in the heart of Nanyang, Singapore and Malaya/Malaysia are well-known sites of vibrant Chinese cultural production. After World War Two, besides literature written by intellectuals, cultural forms with wider appeal have enriched the everyday lives of Chinese in the region. From large-scale publishing, to theatre, to radio broadcast, to film and television, the mix of old and new media technologies enlivened by multiple languages and Chinese dialects were entangled with complex commercial and ideological concerns. This special issue frames the resultant sociocultural formation as “Popular Nanyang,” offering a conceptual framework as well that analyse how people’s leisure preferences and ideas about regionality associated with Singapore, Malaya/Malaysia—and beyond—were animated by quotidian and translocal practices of cultural production and consumption. Collectively, the articles demonstrate how the “popular” in its varied senses of extensive reach, non-state positionality, substantial profitability, content accessibility, and contemporary resonance enabled “Nanyang” as a regional imaginary and a cultural sensibility to survive, travel, and reinvent itself across shifting political and historical contexts from the 1950s till the 1990s despite the rise of “Southeast Asia” as the favoured alternative. Advocating for a cultural history of Chinese communities composed from a grassroots perspective, the special issue harnesses the internal diversity of “Popular Nanyang” to point towards a future mode of historical analysis that recognizes the non-Chinese and non-Sinophone dimensions of mass-oriented Nanyang culture.