Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Kevin YL Tan and Terence Lee, eds. Voting in Change: Politics of Singapore’s 2011 General Election
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Malay Characters in Lloyd Fernando’s Green is the Colour
Full text linkThis essay focuses on how members of the Malay community are characterised in Lloyd Fernando's Green is the Colour (1993) by highlighting the complexities and nuances surrounding Malay identity. Fernando's characterisation of Malays puts focus on discourses of identity and belonging that continue to dominate imaginaries on personal and national levels. By putting the 1969 Sino-Malay Race Riots and the Islamic Revivalism of the 1980s into context, Fernando enables a discussion not only on the many aspects of being Malay, but at the same time address how these many facets of “Malay†identity inform and are informed by the Malaysian socio-political landscape
Brief Notes Towards a Collective Hong Kong Story: Place, Language, History and Politics
Full text linkFor the last seven years, the online journal Cha: An Asian Literary Journal has been publishing poetic works investigating Hong Kong identity and politics. As such, Cha provides a useful source for exploring the different thematic concerns which have preoccupied post-handover writing on the city. In this short essay, I focus on four of these thematic areas (place, language, colonial history and politics) and discuss how they reflect changing political, economic and social realities within Hong Kong
Kylus Chunder Dutt, A Journal of Forty-eight Hours of the Year 1945. Ed. Somdatta Mandal
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“Imagination is a Tricky Powerâ€: Transnationalism and Aesthetic Education in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Work
No full textIn light of the recent "transnational turn" in American Studies, there has been a steady interest in questions about literary productions and aesthetic education. Already Friedrich Schiller’s definition of the concept of aesthetic education in 1794 holds that literature has the potential to assume the role of an agent working towards a paradigm shift away from the national as representational category and towards the embracing of transnational concepts. My article examines the relevance of aesthetic education apparent in a selection of Shirley Lim’s work. Framed through the personal experiences of protagonists and lyrical personae that are always issuing meta-referential comments on the creation of literature or the production and dissemination of knowledge, Lim emphasises the role of aesthetic education as a politically-charged feeling of beauty and belonging. Examples from Lim’s fictional and non-fictional work allow me to trace the ontological dimensions aesthetic education acquires in a transnational context
Postcolonial History and National Identity in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces, Joss and Gold and Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed
Full text linkMalaysia-born Shirley Lim and Indonesia-born Li-Young Lee are first-generation Chinese American authors associated with the Southeast Asian diaspora. In their literary work Among the White Moon Faces, Joss and Gold, and The Winged Seed, Lim and Lee draw the reader into the world of early twentieth-century Southeast Asia, a world shaped by Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s emergence into the postcolonial condition. For both Lim and Lee, independence is the start of an often complex process of nation building and the creation of a national identity that cannot be extricated from the politics of race relations. In this essay, I analyse Lim’s and Lee’s representation of race politics in post-independence Malaysia and Indonesia, highlighting the importance of postcolonial history in the writing of Chinese diasporic identities