Speaker: Dr. Menglu Gao

Institute of Chinese Studies were honoured to invite our visiting scholar of ICS Visiting Fellowship Programme – Dr. Menglu Gao, Assistant Professor of Victorian Literature at University of Denver, to deliver a Public Lecture on the topic of “Plantations as ‘Anti-Plantations’: Victorian Ecological Limbo and Its Aftermath in the Malay Archipelago”.

Drawing on her current project project on plantation ecology in nineteenth-century, Dr. Gao’s presentation focused on four different texts: Alfred Russel Wallace’s travelogue The Malay Archipelago, Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim and two short stories by contemporary Malaysian writer Ng Kim Chew. Dr. Gao argued that authors writing about the colonial or postcolonial Malay Archipelago depict plantations as forest-like to explore an “ecological limbo”—a state in which colonialism’s control of plant life appears chaotic, incomplete, or even unsuccessful, blurring the distinction between cultivated land and wilderness. The lecture provided different angles for audience to understand more on colonial development in Malay Archipelago.