The Englishized Subject ― Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia

This book addresses issues of how the cultures in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia have been Englishized in postcolonial and globcalized contexts, not just in terms of language, but also in writers’/people’s subjectivity. Taking a cultural-literary approach to the study of Englishized subjectivity, the book offers a unique study of hybridized literary/language forms by relating them to bilingual thinking and bicultural sensibility. Poets, novelists and playwrights have different strategies to cope with new images and new forms of expression that can capture their sense of hybridized identity, and as a result, hybridity becomes creativity.

Head of the International Ibsen Committee (University of Oslo) and Foundation Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, Kwok-kan Tam is Chair Professor of English and Dean of Humanities and Social Science at Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He has served as Chair Professor and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at the Open University of Hong Kong and as Professor, Department Chairman and Head of Graduate Division at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has been awarded Visiting Professorships and Fellowships at Stockholm University, Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg, Sophia University, National University of Singapore and the East-West Center, Honolulu. His areas of expertise include Ibsen studies, Gao Xingjian studies, world Englishes, postcolonial studies in literature, identity and gender studies, comparative literature, and drama. He has received numerous fellowships and grants for his research on Chinese Ibsenism.