About

Brian Bernards is an Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at USC Dornsife. His research is inspired by larger questions about intercultural contacts and translingual exchanges within Asia, particularly between East and Southeast Asia, as well as between Sinophone and non-Sinophone communities in those regions. He explores issues of multiculturalism, creolization, and postcoloniality beyond East-West configurations, focusing on how authors and filmmakers wrestle with dominant discourses and master narratives that claim to speak for their subjectivities and cultures. His work emphasizes the creative processes through which experiences of travel, migration, minoritization, and creolization are represented within and between East, South, and Southeast Asia. Bernards has contributed significantly to the fields of Southeast Asian literature and cinema, Sinophone studies, postcolonial studies, and inter-Asia cultural studies, with a focus on Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan. He has authored books, book chapters, and journal articles that examine these themes, and has developed courses related to Southeast Asian literature, translingualism, and Chinese cinema. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in Asian Languages & Cultures from UCLA, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a B.A. from the University of Washington. Bernards has received multiple fellowships and awards, including the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, the SSRC InterAsia Junior Scholar Fellowship, and the USC Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Literature
• Gender studies
• Archaeology
• Art
• Law
• Ancient history
• Geography
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Art history
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• 5 Ann Hui, Hainan, and the Sino-Vietnamese War: A Sinophone Inter-Asian Recasting of Boat People’s Transpacific Refugee Critique

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Iridescent Corners

  Prism · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Sociology

  Abstract Starting in the 1970s, flash fiction developed into an outsized literary practice relative to other Sinophone forms in Singapore. Flash fiction's smallness and brevity cohere with the fast pace of urban Singaporean life and transformation of its cityscape, the compartmentalized relationship between the nation's four official languages, the marginality of literary spaces and challenges to maintaining literature as a profession, and Southeast Asia's relative obscurity as a world literary center (with Singapore as a small but important connective hub). Taking Yeng Pway Ngon's fleeting scene of Speakers' Corner (a flash platform of “gestural politics”) as a point of departure, this article charts a short history of Sinophone flash and its relationship to literary community building in Singapore through integrative readings of representative works by Jun Yinglü, Ai Yu, Wong Meng Voon, Xi Ni Er, and Wu Yeow Chong, recognizing their formal and thematic intersections not as “big ideas in tiny spaces” but as iridescent corners that traverse the state's cultural, political, and geographical out-of-bounds (OB) markers. Rather than privileging professional mastery, their works trace flash fiction's iridescent literariness and worldliness to hyperlocality (the physical and literary “corners” they illuminate), compressed temporality, a participatory culture of authorship, and a spirit of amateurism. This amateurism is derived not from a sense of linguistic underdevelopment or technical lack among these authors, but from their passionate and vulnerable engagement with the flash form, as well as the dissident moral conscience of their thematically and stylistically intersecting critiques of Singapore's sociopolitical OB markers.

  PublisherDOI

• Sinophone meets Siamophone: audio-visual intersubjectivity and pirated ethnicity in Midi Z’s <i>Poor Folk</i> and <i>The Road to Mandalay</i>

  Inter-Asia Cultural Studies · 2021-07-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Since 2010, the Sino-Burmese director Midi Z has established himself as a compelling Southeast Asian independent auteur. The films Poor Folk (2012) and The Road to Mandalay (2016) are distinct in his oeuvre for being shot and set in Thailand. Integral to Midi Z’s transnational portraits of a marginal yet mobile Sinophone community traversing the borders of Myanmar, Yunnan, Thailand, and Taiwan (reflecting the director’s own life trajectory) are the Siamophone conditions these two films highlight in their accented audioscape. Midi Z’s covert videography mirrors his protagonists’ illicit migration to Thailand, their purchase of forged documents to secure work in Thailand or to exit the country, and their need to conceal their Burmeseness from official surveillance to avoid arrest and deportation. Focusing on how these protagonists draw on bicultural Sino-Thainess and the indigenous “Zomian” milieu of Thailand’s upland terrain to “pirate” their ethnic covers and author the terms of their intersubjective legibility under state regimes of census and surveillance, I argue that Thailand serves as a critical departure point from which Midi Z evokes interlinked Sinophone and Siamophone conditions to audio-visually refashion and reimagine Sino-Burmese intersubjectivity.

  PublisherDOI

• Sinophonic Detours in Colonial Burma

  Prism · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Abstract Following his 1925–1931 overland trek across southwestern China to colonial Burma, Ai Wu's 1935 Travels in the South (the author's canonical collection of autobiographical travelogue fiction) represents a Sinophonic detouring of the key literary impulses of the author's May Fourth forebears and his left-wing literary contemporaries, especially with its social realist expressions of gendered frontier primitivism, interethnic romantic desire, and international leftist solidarity. Ai Wu's southbound transborder itinerary and “street education”—marked by a repetition of trespasses and evictions—develop a “counterpoetics of trespass” blurring boundaries between social realist fiction and autobiographical travelogue while intertextually rerouting romantic primitivism in depictions of indigenous women through counterpoetically anemic prose. Initially taking his cue from Lu Xun, Ai Wu similarly inscribes his literary mission as one of national redemption but in a way that conforms to the leftist internationalist ideals of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which Ai Wu joined after he was forcibly repatriated to China by British colonial authorities in 1931. Ai Wu's Sinophone transborder counterpoetics activate latent self-reflections on the narrator's own male Han-centric exoticism toward indigenous Shan and Burman women and on his unfulfilled desire to forge meaningful relationships with them. Rather than assimilating or subordinating his depictions of these women into a projection of a Chinese leftist national cause, Ai Wu ultimately sublimates his romantic desires into an allegory for Burma's anticolonial resistance movement.

  PublisherDOI

• Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives, Liew Khai Khiun and Stephen Teo (eds) (2017)

  Asian Cinema · 2020-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Review of: Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives , Liew Khai Khiun and Stephen Teo (eds) (2017) Abingdon: Routledge, 194 pp. ISBN 978-1-13859-569-9, p/bk, US$57.95

  PublisherDOI

• Mockumenting Migrant Workers

  positions asia critique · 2019-04-30 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As a repressed space that lies behind the national heartland and beyond the purview of the dominant ideological contestation between official and cinematic discourses over this heartland, Singapore’s “inter-Asian hinterland” denotes the spaces where three key interrelations play out: geopolitical relations between Singapore and its regional neighbors; legal relations between Singaporean citizens and temporary nonresidents from these neighboring countries working in Singapore’s low-wage labor industries; and racialized relations between Singapore’s Chinese majority and the South and Southeast Asian minorities who are presumed by official multiracialist and Asian values rhetoric to locate their “uncontaminated” cultural heritage in these other countries. As two simultaneously gendered and racialized figures embodying these three relations, the female Indonesian domestic worker and the male Indian manual laborer are respectively the subject of imaginative narration in No Day Off (2006) and My Magic (2008), both directed by Chinese Singaporean auteur Eric Khoo. In these films, Khoo allegorizes these three relations to construct the inter-Asian hinterland as a counter-discursive space informed by a critical regionalism that undermines the supraracial, pan-Asianist ideology of the Singaporean heartland. Parodying aesthetics of documentary realism (namely its indexical relationship to social reality), Khoo develops his mockumentary syntax, which best characterizes his cross-cinematic imprint, by self-reflexively implicating the voyeuristic penetration of media surveillance into the lives of the socially marginal to comment on desensitized apathy toward the abuse of migrant workers and the disparities of inter-Asian labor migration in Singapore.

  PublisherDOI

• Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature

  Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia · 2018-11-30 · 49 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

  PublisherDOI

• Ng Kim Chew (黃錦樹) (1967–)

  2018-10-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Ng Kim Chew is a Chinese Malaysian author of short fiction and literary scholar who lives in Taiwan. Born in Johor, Ng migrated to Taiwan to attend Taiwan University in 1989. After earning his doctorate from Tsinghua University, Ng became professor of Chinese literature at National Chinan University. Despite residing and publishing in Taiwan, Ng’s short fiction is largely set in Southeast Asia. His stories explore language and literary history, interethnic and religious politics, indigenous and diasporic nationalism, exile, migration and hybridity. As the winner of several Chinese literary awards, Ng’s short fiction is highly ironic, satirical and farcical.

  PublisherDOI

• Reanimating creolization through pop culture: Yasmin Ahmad’s inter-Asian audio-visual integration

  Asian Cinema · 2017-04-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract As one of the most critically celebrated and analysed Malaysian auteurs, Yasmin Ahmad (1959−2009) addressed the complicated postcolonial politics of Malaysia’s multiculturalism in her six feature films. This article examines the relationship between her cinematic imagination of Malaysian multiculturalism and her frequent inter-Asian pop culture referencing. These references initiate on-screen crosscultural dialogues that upend ethnic, gender and class stereotypes. Aestheticizing experiences of partial intelligibility, Yasmin’s audio-visual integration of multilingualism reanimates historical creolization as unanticipated intimacies suppressed by Malaysia’s postcolonial multiculturalism. Questioning popular interpretations of her characters’ relationships as ‘interracial’, this reanimation of creolization does not celebrate the coalescence of an overarching Malaysian or Asian identity (or cinema), but rather proposes more affectionate modes of re-conceptualizing crosscultural relations and initiating neighbourly dialogue.

  PublisherDOI

• Malaysia as Method

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016-09-01 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Set during a 1987 police crackdown on protestors challenging the discriminatory policies of the Malaysian government, Malaysian Chinese author Xiao Hei’s “A Literary Record of October 27 and Other Things” (1989) uses postcolonial Malaysia’s thirtieth national anniversary to reflect upon institutionalized ethnolinguistic minoritization. Through intertextual citation, Xiao Hei’s novella not only constitutes a collaborative historical record of<italic>Ma Hua</italic>(Malaysian Chinese/Sinophone Malaysian) literature, but also a polyvocal interrogation of its own ethnolinguistic literary taxonomy. Xiao Hei’s strategic representation of Malaysia as historical experience, contested polity, claimed nation, and rejected state apparatus exposes how the ethnolinguistic taxonomy reinforces national estrangement. Drawing from Kuan-hsing Chen’s proposal of “Asia as method,” this chapter argues that Malaysia in Xiao Hei’s novella alternatively functions as a mediating site for the decolonization of Malaysian national literature’s ethnolinguistic basis as well as the deimperialization of an overseas Chinese literary framework prioritizing ethnicity/language over locality.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Howard Kahm

  Waseda University

  1 shared

• William Marotti

  1 shared

• Chien-hsin Tsai

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

• Hijoo Son

  Waseda University

  1 shared

• Koichi Haga

  Waseda University

  1 shared

• Emily Anderson

  1 shared

• Mika At

  Waseda University

  1 shared

• Spencer Jackson

  Film Independent

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Individual Fellowship, Asian Cultural Council (2024-2025)
• Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship, SSRC Inter…
• Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach, Andrew…
• USC Funding Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Soci…
• Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences…