Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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"A Multilingual Life": The Cosmopolitan and Globalectic Dimensions of Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Writings
Full text linkThe new debates in cosmopolitanism over the last decade are the latest attempt to imagine a critical framework that is more culturally inclusive. These cosmopolitan discussions offer fertile possibilities for discovering new relevance in those multicultural or "ethnic" writings traditionally marginalised in national and transnational formations. Post-multicultural and post-ethnic writers can be given critical recognition as mediating figures that facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global or, in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s more felicitous term "globalectics." The very elements that have been traditionally associated with their constitutive oppression, the belief that they are at home nowhere or in more than one place, could be rethought to constitute their greatest attribute – that they can navigate the structures of belonging in multiple ways, not least by challenging the complacent assumptions or self-evident universalisms that undergird many forms of both nationalism and globalisation. Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s texts will be analysed to show how she is an exemplary figure of the neo-cosmopolitan globalectic writer
Self-Referential Narrative and Creative Filiation in Chinese American Writing: Maxine Hong Kingston and Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Full text linkThis paper aims at discussing Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s 1996 memoir – Among the White Moon Faces – as inviting a conceptualisation and examination of lineage conceived otherwise than (only) on a biological mode. I am interested in showing that when the question of filiation is examined from a literary perspective and focuses on different possible relations to a writer and a narrative belonging to a different generation, it is also intimately related to an attitude towards cultural heritage.   My basic postulation is that references to The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, a seminal and uniquely innovative work in (Chinese) American letters are visible on a double level, diegetic and extradiegetic, and weave a fruitful relationship not only with the conceptualisations of self-representation that emerge in Kingston’s first opus, but also with the narrative and discursive configurations that sustain them. By tracing and analysing these different echoes and resonances it will be evinced how in Lim’s and Kingston’s case, the questions of heritage or, forthat matter, the one of transmission, go beyond the simple following in someone’s footsteps or unilateralism to which they are usually reduced, weaving into the literary field other connections than those established by chronology or aesthetics
Cosmopolitan Pedagogies: Revisiting Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Short Fiction
Full text linkThis paper explores the author’s experience in teaching Lim’s short stories in Singapore over the course of two decades. Lim’s short fiction has often been seen as subordinate to her poetry and to her longer works of prose fiction and memoir, and it has been read as a part of a career that evolves from a specific politics of location in Malaysia to an engagement with larger questions of feminism, minoritisation and cosmopolitanism identity in the United States. Such a historicist reading needs to be balanced by the reading perspectives on Lim’s fiction of newer generation of Singapore students to whom their settings are now often unfamiliar. Far from being a portrait of a now vanished past in another country, however, Lim’s fiction may fruitfully be read within the context of contemporary Singapore, especially in its questioning of doxologies concerning racialisation and sexuality and its promotion of what may initially seem a paradox: a local cosmopolitanism. Recent critical work on the short story as genre, indeed, suggests that questions regarding a local cosmopolitan ethics may be made particularly acute by the formal features of the short story, features of which Lim makes skilful use
