This monograph makes a significant contribution to Sinophone studies through its investigation of the relationships among Sinitic-language cultural production, historical experiences of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the imaginary homeland (China proper). Remapping the Sinophone complicates Shu-mei Shih's definition of Sinophone by examining the depictions of “Chineseness” in Malayan and Singaporean films made before and during the Cold War period. It not only addresses the omission of film in the scholarship on Southeast Asian Sinophone cultural production, which has primarily focused on literary texts after 1960, but also expands the scope of Sinophone cinema studies, which have been limited to works from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Anglophone regions outside Asia. Wai-Siam Hee contests the epistemology of the term “Sinophone,” which is deployed to question Euro-American colonialism and neocolonialism, China-centrism, diaspora, and national identity.
Culling through declassified documents, archives, newspapers, tabloids, magazines, and other print media, Hee contends that heterogeneous...
