Keeping to the Margins

This chapter examines Macau Sinophone literature during the pre-postcolonial era (1987–1999) through the work of the poet Yiling. The chapter argues that a position of marginality, often read as one of weakness, can be wielded as a resource for the benefit of a marginal literary project. Whereas minor sites of literary construction can harbor little interest in displacing Sinocentrism, Yiling’s “poetics of insignificance” in proposing value in a position of liminal peripherality, enables us to consider how the periphery can also be a place where Chinacentrism is strategically articulated and marginality is bent at will.