Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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“Old Marley Married a Chinese Writerâ€: Towards an Aesthetics of Confident Intertextuality
No full textIn exploring how intertextuality functions in two Christmas tales published in Suchen Christine Lim’s recent collection of short stories, The Lies that Build a Marriage: Stories of the Unsung, Unsaid and Uncelebrated in Singapore (2007), this article aims to reassess recent developments in Singaporean writing that promise to open up an aesthetics of intertextuality. This new aesthetic engagement with literary legacies forms part of an important move away from the increasingly problematic issue of postcolonial self exoticisation. Instead, such self-reflexive fiction critically and often self-ironically dissects the multifarious potential of literary traditions. “Christmas Memories of a Chinese Stepfather†and “Christmas at Singapore Casket†play with an established genre in order to render this interpretative adaptation a vehicle not so much simply of current issues, but of their careful interrogation
De-familiarising Nationalist Discourses: Performative Ironies of the Normative Indian Episteme
Get PDFThe present excursus attempts a deconstructive reading of the foundational texts of normative Indian nationalism and problematises them and their epistemic plexus through the critical trajectories of Homi K. Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee. Nationalism still remains a primary signifier in academic debates and in works like The Nation and its Fragments and Nationalist Thoughts and the Colonial World, Chatterjee challenges the assumption that nationalism in Asia and Africa is a derivative version of pre-given European nationalist a prioris. For Chatterjee, Asian and African nationalism was based on difference and not on derivation and the present essay addresses this differentiality, this dynamics of performative operativity of Indian nationalism with specific references to textual episteme of foundational thinkers such as Tagore, Gandhi, Vivekananda and Jawaharlal Nehru. We interrogate the normative cognitivities of these foundational thinkers by pitting them against the radical conceptualisation of DissemiNation of Homi K. Bhabha. We argue that while the foundational texts of Indian nationalism did not imitate the epistemic structures of the West they ended up in offering only mythic abstractions and religious normativities that surely fail to betray any proud deliberative encounter with “the historic and objective realities†of India
Interrogating the Ambivalence of Self-Fashioning and Redefining the Immigrant Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine
Get PDFRejecting the paralysis of exilic consciousness, Bharati Mukherjee embraces the cultural diaspora of America to create a transformed identity of her own. Her psychological evolution is reflected in her fictional character, Jasmine, who, like her, subverts and participates in the hegemonic notion of immigrant identity and tries to carve out a different selfhood by participating in the violent process of decolonising the mind. However, the novel subverts this emancipatory rhetoric by creating ambiguous sites of identity performance where the protagonist is both complicit and resistant to the dominant culture. Analysis of these ambiguous sites in the novel would require us to consider the rhetoric of American “exceptionalism†which makes the United States a unique, liberal, “redeemer†nation, a place where individuals could carve out their identities through hard work, agency and determination. The aim of this paper is to apply the above rhetoric to explore the ambivalence of identity and subvert the notion of agency in Mukherjee’s diasporic novel, Jasmine (1989)
Moving Home, Writing Home: Transnational Identity in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces
Get PDFShirley Geok-lin Lim’s autobiography, Among the White Moon Faces: A Memoir of Asian-American Homelands (1996), narrates the Malaysian American author’s geographical and ontological journey, from her birthplace to the United States, to which she emigrated as a graduate student at the end of the 1960s. The writer recalls her visits back home and her migrations across her host country, shedding light on the exile’s contradictory desires as to the prospect of his/her socio-political and cultural integration within the new land. Lim’s memoir encapsulates the turmoil which the (im)migrant in exile experiences as he/she tries to figure out his/her status on foreign soil, shifting from the position of the traveller, the exile to the one of the resident alien and eventually consenting to become an American(ised) citizen. Still, ambivalence pervades Lim’s relationship with her host country while reviving her primary ties to the native land; Among the White Moon Faces questions geographical fixity, the unique territorial inscription as the site for the Malaysian-born immigrant’s sense of belonging in America, therefore invalidating any assimilationist reading of her autobiographical itinerary. As the author emphasises the necessity of communal and poetic bonds to Malaysia and America, home re-emerges and thrives beyond the boundaries of national delineation