This talk shows 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. Dr. Gao traces this ecological limbo by reading two nineteenth-century English texts—Alfred Russel Wallace’s travelogue The Malay Archipelago (1869) and Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1899–1900)—alongside contemporary Malaysian writer Ng Kim Chew’s 黃錦樹 Chinese short stories. In these texts, the plantation frustrates colonial expectations of a neatly ordered imperial space and provides a metonymic pattern to communicate a specific kind of plant-like—that is, motionless-yet-vigorous—subaltern recalcitrance that also characterizes plantation laborers and local inhabitants. While recent scholarship in the environmental humanities has shown that capitalist exploitation of ecology extends beyond the plantation economy to haunt the seemingly “natural” spaces such as the pastoral countryside and even forests in literary representations, the talk takes the opposite direction, asking how literature, rather than registering the ubiquity of imperial power and capitalism (even critically), exposes their limits in the face of vegetal life within the very settings of the colonial plantation.

Speaker:

Dr. Menglu Gao is Assistant Professor of Victorian Literature in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and Anglophone literature, with research interests in comparative literature (English, Chinese, Spanish, and French), literature and medicine, empire studies, environmental humanities, and critical theory. Her research has been recognized by several North American and international awards in Victorian studies or global nineteenth-century studies, including the 2025 Vcologies Early Career Paper Prize, the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies’ 2021–22 Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, and the 2020 Walter L. Arnstein Prize. She is completing her first monograph, “Addictive Forms: Opium, Physiology, and the Stimulable Empire in the Nineteenth Century.” Her new project examines plantation ecology in nineteenth-century and contemporary literary representations of the global South.

Date: 21 October 2025 (Tuesday)

Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm (4:00pm: Tea Reception)

Venue: Activities Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, CUHK

Language: English

Registration: Click here

Enquiry: 3943 5976/ This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.