SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter argues that digital labor plays a pivotal role in the worlding mechanism of regional and national literatures in the East Asian context. Yeung probes the role of digital labor in canonizing Third-World literature, or what she conceives as an “East Asian digital literary field,” with reference to four sets of digital archives and databases and two literary magazines from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. Yeung is especially interested in whether the digital laborers have succeeded in elevating their respective local, national, or regional national literatures to the status of world literature. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, doxa, and capital, Yeung conceives the East Asian digital literary field. This chapter attends to three problems in canon formation—translation, the problematic notion of the ‘world,’ and various forms of ‘-centrisms.’ Hence an objective of this chapter is to initiate the discussion on the significance of digital labor and the products of such labor in the context of East Asian digital archives and literary magazines by providing some primary data for further studies on this emerging field.