Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Longing and Belonging, Exile and Home in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Joss and Gold
Full text linkIn Abdul R. JanMohammed’s seminal work “Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,†he poignantly explores the themes of home, exile and homelessness through an analysis of Edward Said’s and Richard Wright’s works. He explains that both the syncretic intellectual and the specular border intellectual are posited between at least two different cultures.   "The syncretic intellectual, more 'at home' in both cultures than his or her specular counterpart, is able to combine  elements of the two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences….  By contrast, the specular border intellectual, while perhaps equally familiar with two cultures, finds himself or herself unable or unwilling to be at home in these societies. Caught between several cultures or groups, none of which are deemed sufficiently enabling or productive, the specular intellectual subjects the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them; he or she utilizes his or her interstitial cultural space as a vantage point from which to define, implicitly or explicitly, other, utopian possibilities of group formation. (97)"Set against the backdrop of the 1969 race riots in Malaysia, the multifaceted 1980s United States and the “second-most globalized country in the world†(Holden 2) Singapore, Shirley Lim’s first novel Joss and Gold traces the female protagonist Li An’s trajectory to find a sense of home and belonging in multivalent Malaysia and Singapore. Utilizing JanMohamed’s theory of the syncretic and specular intellectual, this paper intends to examine the themes of longing and belonging, exile and home in Shirley Lim’s Joss and Gold, and focuses on Li An’s journey from an emotionally homeless orphan, a specular, to a syncretic intellectual
History is a (Marital) Nightmare: Chinese and British Feminisms in Josephine Chia’s My Mother-In-Law’s Son
Full text linkPolitics of Right to Write and Monica Ali’s Fiction
Full text linkThe Brick Lane-writer Monica Ali’s status as an ethnic icon – an image so hyped by the white media – automatically curbs her creative freedom of representation and confines her to ghettoes. Consequently, Ali’s other pieces are ignored, not because of their lesser literary merit but for their author’s treading into “not-permissible†grounds, that is, “non-ethnic†materials. The audiences back home and within diaspora, on the other hand, tend to consider this Dhaka-born writer just as one more outsider having no legitimacy to deal with them, and they even voiced their outrage in London streets against Brick Lane (2003) for depicting what they considered a “shameful†portrait of them. They question her right to write about “home†just as the West could not appreciate the European or American settings and characters in her later books. Ali, on her part, however, claims to have disowned these licensing authorities in a bid to safeguard her writerly discretion. Brick Lane thus becomes the metaphor that embodies the poetics and practices of this intricate, intriguing politics in which the hegemonic publishing industry in the West along with the grinding U.S.-U.K. review machine (of The New York Times, The Guardian and so on) has rather a decisive role to play
Reflections on Adivasi Silence: An Interview with the Eminent Activist for Tribal Rights and Environmental Crusader Mahasweta Devi
Full text link“How Can I Prove that I am Not Who I am?â€: Layered Identities and Genres in the Work of Shirley Geok-lin Lim
No full textWith the recent publication of The Shirley Lim Collection, it is now more apparent than ever the range of Shirley Lim’s creative and scholarly pursuits. Writing in multiple genres including short stories, flash fiction, poetry, memoir, novels and academic scholarship, Lim’s work captures many dimensions not only of layered identities but also of layered genres. Much has already been written about her universal themes of shifting identities, loss, displacement, belonging and borders. This article addresses these issues but through the lens of multiple and layered genres. Like the geographical border crossings that Lim addresses in her work, she also crosses genre borders, examining these issues in many different forms. This article asks what difference form makes in representing identities and reconciling the conflicting identities within.   Like her fellow academics, Audre Lorde and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (among others), Shirley Geok-lin Lim engages in memoir in part to document women’s experiences of intellectual life in the academy. Beyond providing lessons learned for future women academics, however, memoirs like Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces, construct a self-conscious and interactive performance space, encouraging readers to experience the author’s reflexivity. Under Della Pollock’s formulation, Lim’s memoir thus serves as performative autobiography, “tend[ing] to subject the reader to the writer’s reflexivity, drawing [her] respective subject-selves reciprocally and simultaneously into critical ‘intimacy’†(“Performative Writing†86). Lim writes about the “tensions†in her multiple identities, proving that she is something other than what the academy imagines she should be. During this process, she reflects on her role as an educator and feminist, asking readers directly, “Do wild feminists live in universities? Can they?†(Among the White Moon Faces 226). In this way, she self-consciously constructs an interactive text that engages readers’ senses of civic, academic and intellectual justice. In doing so, she reveals an additional element to performative autobiography not yet defined by scholars: a call to action. Lim’s text mirrors for women the ways that they can write “out of turn†(Profession 214) and dismantle the power structures that serve to reify dominant narratives of self and women in the academy. By examining what Lim’s text does as much as what it says, I highlight the ways her memoir resists cultural definitions of immigrant women and Asian literature scholars in particular, and generic definitions of memoir and scholarly writing more generally. Furthermore, I compare these resistances to the ways she addresses similar issues in her poetry and fiction, exploring the ways that form can impact the ways that identities are told, represented, and (mis)understood
What Melts in the “Melting Pot†of Hong Kong?
No full textThis paper analyses the vicissitudes of Hong Kong people‘s waves of hostility toward visitors from mainland China, treating the hostility as exemplary of a more general but extensive problem of racialism in China. It has two intentions. First, it wants to understand historically how since the start of the twenty-first century, the simplicity of Hong Kongers‘ confused response towards mainlanders has grown into a series of organised "anti-mainlander campaigns" and an allegedly "racist" phenomenon. Second, this paper seeks to document and investigate these sometimes-dangerous sentiments that characterise, confuse and overtake the Hong Kongers‘ struggle for liberal democracy and regional autonomy. To do so is not to pattern itself on the Chinese state‘s announced goal of policing Hong Kong‘s status as a "special administrative region." Although Hong Kongers derive small political benefit from such "campaigns," they have few ways in which they can overcome the prospect of losing their distinctiveness and becoming one of the many cities of "global China." Given the complex origins of this Hong Kong-mainland relationship in historical colonialism and global capitalism, and given the People‘s Republic‘s new power and status as a key player in the global capital order, Hong Kongers seek to express themselves through free speech, but doing so in a way which creates a public spectacle
