What does it mean to characterise someone, something or somewhere as "Nanyang"? Whether in studies of Nanyang elite or popular cultures, the term is today frequently invoked as a shorthand for a place-based Southeast Asian Chinese identity formed predominantly through acclimatisation to, and interaction with, local cultures and environments, especially in the context of Singapore. This paper rethinks the notion of "popular Nanyang" beyond this usual paradigm through an examination of Singaporean film star Chong Sit Fong's regional stardom in the 1950s and 1960s. Uncovering how Chong simultaneously embodied different kinds of Chinese national, local and translocal identities, this paper illustrates how the characteristic of transborder malleability, which refers to the capacity to simultaneously embody seemingly contradictory ideologies across borders, enabled Chong to attain regional film stardom during a time of geopolitical flux. This gestures towards an understanding of Nanyang Chineseness not only as place-based, but also inherently translocal and transnational, suggesting how "Nanyang" indexes a flexible modality of identity that functions across geopolitical borders during the 1950s and 1960s.
Cognisant of the multivalent, shifting meanings of "Nanyang" as a spatiotemporal, geopolitical, geo-economic, and cultural unit, this article seeks to flesh out the concept of "Popular Nanyang" by bringing in the contributions of popular culture from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Historically, ethnic Chinese played an important role in the creation of "the popular," albeit often dismissed as commercial or of low cultural value, in the plurilingual settings of their respective domiciles. Their networked production, distribution, circulation, consumption, and (e)valuation of popular culture helped substantiate the reach and bounds of "Nanyang" as geography, market, and regional imaginary. This article reclaims and repurposes the term "Greater Nanyang" to give weight to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao as hubs for the multi-sited co-creation of the Popular Nanyang from the Cold War era to the end of the twentieth century. The Greater Nanyang concept highlights the historicity, materiality, politics, economies, ecologies, and cultures of localisation, meaning-making, and value creation that underpin place-, identity-, and claim-making in, across, and beyond the region. The temporal depth of Popular Nanyang also raises questions about Sinophone assumptions of the convergence of language, audience, cultural literacy, and ethnicity in the production, circulation, and consumption of popular culture.
During the peak of the anti-yellow cultural movement in Singapore (1953-1956), Yao Zi-now recognised as a pioneering figure in postwar Sinophone Malayan literature-was criticised as a pornographic "yellow" writer. This article explores the cultural debates and phenomena of 1950s Malaya, a period of social transformation in the late colonial era shaped by ideological polarisation during the Cold War and anti-colonial nationalism. It focuses on the moral panic surrounding "yellow"-a term in which concerns surrounding sexuality and Chinese ethnicity intersect-through a historical and cultural analysis of the author Yao Zi's literary and editorial works. It situates them within broader debates about yellow literature, demonstrating the ways sexuality, ethnicity, and womanhood were constructed as moral categories of social engagement within the Cold War-era battlegrounds of modernity and decolonisation. The first section of this article reexamines the anti-yellow cultural movement and its associated moral discourse by introducing Yao and his conceptualisation of popular literature in Nanyang, showing how they challenged ideological binaries and gender norms during the cultural Cold War. The second section shifts to another dimension of yellow panic: its intersections with Chinese identity and gender. Focusing on the romance genre that secured Yao's literary prominence, it analyses his lesser-known novella The Storm (1954) for its depiction of women's narrative presence and the Chinese experience of gendered modernity in Malaya, an experience conditioned by a cultural nationalism uneasy with hybridity.
This article examines Chong Gay Theatres' role in circulating mainland Chinese cinema in Singapore from the 1970s to the 1980s under the leadership of Lim Djit Sun (1925-1987). Known for importing left-leaning Hong Kong films, Chong Gay shifted in the 1980s to Mandarin-language productions from the People's Republic of China in collaboration with the Shanghai Film Corporation, a transition shaped by the Speak Mandarin Campaign, changing censorship policies, and generational shifts in audience taste. Emerging from networks around the anti-yellow culture movement and earlier left-leaning cultural and entertainment circles, Chong Gay recast progressive cultural ideals through the discourse of "healthy films" within an increasingly regulated media environment. Drawing on archival sources, media reports, and oral interviews, I trace how "healthy films" were redefined through the interaction of ideological commitment and commercial pressure during a period of cultural transition in Singapore. By examining film delegations and festivals in the 1980s, hybrid genres, and youth reception, I argue that Singapore became a key node in late Cold War transregional exchange, where films from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China converged and were reinterpreted. Intermediaries such as Lim promoted PRC cinema as an edifying alternative to commercial culture while sustaining cultural ties with reform-era China. Singapore thus functioned as a distribution hub and testing ground where PRC films were evaluated and adapted for Southeast Asian audiences. Although officially-sanctioned healthy films were associated with discipline and social harmony, their ambivalent reception reveals unease over the commercialisation of PRC cinema and the persistence of residual leftist sensibilities.
