Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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W. Somerset Maugham and the Politicisation of the Chinese Landscape
Get PDFIn her investigation into the changing literary response to and examination of imperialism during the 1920s and the phenomenon of the rise of the colonial anti-hero, Barbara Bush cites Graham Greene, George Orwell and W. Somerset Maugham as three of the most influential authors of the period who helped perpetuate the West’s re-examination of the idea of colonialism (84). Indeed, with such memorable works as “Shooting an Elephant,â€Â The Quiet American and The Painted Veil, together with the abundance of scholarships that address and redress this topic, the importance of these writers to the development of post-colonialism in literature during the early twentieth century cannot be denied. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this ongoing discussion by focusing on W. Somerset Maugham and his use of the Chinese landscape as a means to forward his views on this issue. In particular, I wish to pay attention to the significance of landscape depiction in his narratives and consider its relevance to our understanding of Maugham as an imperialist/anti-imperialist writer within the framework of conventional Saidian Orientalism
Home as an Emotional Construct in Romesh Gunesekera’s The Reef and The Sandglass
Get PDFGlobalist discourse confounds the once clearly demarcated territorial borders of geography, national identity and belonging. This is more so in a diasporic situation that forces us to rethink concepts of nationalism, transnationalism and transmigration. Territorial belonging becomes complex for the traversals involved question the rigidity of identity itself. The categories of religion, ethnicity, gender and nationality become unstable. Diasporic identity emerges as a kind of unsettled space or an unresolved question in that space, between a number of intersecting discourses, and the location of belonging gets governed by these varying identities. Since identity itself is grounded in the huge unknowns of our psychic lives, memory plays a vital role in unravelling of the ways in which the discontinuities of time past and time present collapse spatial and temporal boundaries. Such deterritorialisation of the idea of homeland describes the disjunctions and fractured conditions of lived reality. The idea of nationhood and belonging is, therefore, always in a state of flux and mediated by personal and collective memories.   The fiction of Romesh Gunesekera, a Sri Lankan writer now living in London, weaves together themes of memory, exile and postcolonial upheavals. The paper attempts to study two novels of Gunesekera, The Reef (1994) and The Sandglass (1998) and see how the territory of emotions determines the territory of longing and belonging in a diasporic situation. Being governed by location in time and place, the expatriate’s feelings about “home†are indelibly marked by his relationship with the home country. Located in London, the novels echo the histories, fugitive memories, crashed dreams and moments of promise that lie interwoven with lives lived in Sri Lanka
Street Meditations: On Poetry, Street Photography and Everyday Life in Hong Kong
Get PDFThis paper is part of an ongoing auto-ethnographic project to do with writing poetry and taking photographs in Hong Kong. As a poet who is interested in the aesthetic potential of visual images, I am intrigued by what Michel de Certeau calls the “absent figure,†a figure often obscured by techniques and rationalities that govern the everyday life of the urban city that is Hong Kong (vi). If art is about the salvaging of meaning, then it is in league with everyday life, to the extent that artistic works become transgressive and predatory mediums. Poems and photographs are regarded here as forms that usurp the material spaces of Hong Kong. In this way, one is led to consider the possibilities of cultural production as a kind of furtive production wherein the everyday life of Hong Kong is made to speak
Ordinary People on the Move: Subaltern Cosmopolitanisms in Amitav Ghosh’s Writings
Get PDFThis essay draws on Ulf Hannerz’s notion of locals and cosmopolitans and Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of the tourists and the vagabonds to focus on the movements of ordinary folks in Ghosh’s works due to a number of reasons that equip them with an “orientation towards the other†(Berland 124). Borrowing Joseph Berland’s category of “multi-service nomads,†it argues that his engagement with these movements anticipates the new discourse on cosmopolitanism and shows that in contrast to contemporary cosmopolitan narratives that privilege the movements of the new professional, intellectual or artistic elite, Ghosh recovers the buried narratives of those who may be called subaltern cosmopolitans even though their movements might have been triggered from above. After summarising contemporary understandings of cosmopolitanism as developed in the discourse of globalisation, the essay proceeds to uncover such cosmopolitanism that was produced through the contact zones created by trade, travel and indenturement
Reinventing Caste: Indian Diaspora in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
Get PDFProfoundly engaged in capturing the outward flow of plantation diaspora from India in the nineteenth century, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) focuses on one female girmitiya named Deeti, a high caste widow from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh, who elopes with an untouchable. Taking cue from the pages of Sir George Grierson’s diary, Ghosh recovers Deeti from history, not so much with the imagination of a novelist as with the instincts of an anthropologist. Devoted to reinvention, the novel tackles the loss of  Deeti’s caste, its contested status in the migratory experience and its final recovery as a  thematic concern. Though the traditional caste hierarchy was practically lost in the  migratory process, I argue, it continued to exist in alternative form and only waited to be found in time. I also argue that the old Indian diaspora’s sentimental search for their ancestral roots in India is played out in the novel with the suggestion that their search may reveal some uncomfortable truth they would not like to know. Â
Translocating Identity in Sino-Indian Diasporic Literature: Kwai-Yun Li’s The Last Dragon Dance
Get PDFThe Last Dragon Dance and Other Stories (2008) by Kwai-Yun Li is a collection of short stories that trace a triangular trajectory of geographical movement from origin in China, birth and growing up in India and then emigration to America. Kwai-Yun Li is a diasporic writer who just does not move from one country to another but also inhabits an intermediary home at some point of time in her life. This paper examines the themes of the twice-migrant Sino-South Asian diaspora and focuses on where we can situate writing that is Chinese in ethnicity, Indian in upbringing and North American in location. The stories in the collection are set among the Chinese community in Calcutta in the 1950s and 60s. In locating the stories in Calcutta, Kwai-Yun seems to displace the importance of the West and of the home country, a displacement it achieves by describing the tension, richness and complexity of Chinese life in India
