5 - Forging Contact Zone: On Politicized Affects of Cantophone in Diasporic Hong Kong Literature in Taiwan

Presentation Abstract
Marie Louise Pratt (1992) defined “Contact Zone” as “social spaces where cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today”. However the critical vigor of the concept has weakened, thanks to the progression of multiculturalism, primarily in developed regions. One of the main reasons is that, in on the multiculturalist topology, “contact” was replaced with co-existence, that refers to the non-intervention suggested by liberal ideology. The effect of the asymmetrical power relationship was partially stalled by tolerance without care.
This presentation, by analysing language experience represented in diasporic Hong Kong literature in Taiwan, reveals the emergence of a highly mobile ultra-minority, in which Cantonese were not yet acknowledged as the “language of newcomers”, such as Vietnamese and Indonesian. This adds to the dialect status in a supposedly multicultural Sinophone literary paradigm. By understanding “contact zone” as a practice rather than a social fact, the paper attempts to reinvigorate the concept with subaltern and underrepresentation.