Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
Not a member yet
528 research outputs found
Sort by
Introduction
Full text linkI am honoured to be a part of this issue of Asiatic and writing the Introduction to this section of four essays, which were originally presented as papers at the colloquium on “Journeys of/toward Identity†convened on 15 October 2015 by the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. Professor Mohammad A. Quayum delivered Colloquium 2015’s opening keynote address. The articles that appear here have been specifically selected and revised for publication in Asiatic. They also help situate and (re)historicise a theoretically abstracted concept like “identity.â
Articulation, Agency and Embodiment in Contemporary Pakistani Urdu Poetry by Women
Full text linkThis paper explores the notions of “articulation,†“agency†and “embodiment†in Urdu poetry composed by Pakistani women. Although these terms have been taken from the First world feminist discourses, we aim to highlight how these three terms were not merely reflected in the contemporary poetry of Pakistani women, but rather were used to express their own modalities and associations as they countered the patriarchal system within which they were embedded. Our study does not simply apply these terms on selected poems by Kishwar Naheed (1940-), Fehmeeda Riaz (1946-) and Azra Abbas (1948-), but it also explores how these terms undergo a discursive diffraction as the Pakistani woman is no longer seen as a subaltern entity with a silenced subjectivity. We have taken on board the synonymic idea of writing as an agentive act of embodiment, as theorised by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. This is to show that while these terms were theorised by Western feminists, contemporary Pakistani women writers have, over the last few decades, been enacting these terms in ways which deny the stereotypical projection of the Third world woman in the Western gender discourses. For these women writers, writing enacts embodiment through articulation and thus agentively counters the objectifying gaze of the patriarchal order
The Lingua Franca Core and Englishes in East and Southeast Asia
Full text linkIt has been argued, especially by Jenkins (2000, 2007), that it should not be the goal of learners to imitate speakers from the UK or USA. Instead, they should aim to achieve mutual intelligibility with other speakers of English as a Lingua Franca from around the world. This led her to propose the Lingua Franca Core, an inventory of pronunciation features that she suggests are necessary for maintaining intelligibility in international communication, while features outside the core are unimportant. However, the Lingua Franca Core remains controversial. This paper presents an overview of the pronunciation features of four varieties of English in the Outer Circle (using the Three Circles model of Kachru, 1985), Brunei English, Hong Kong English, Malaysian English and Singapore English, and one variety in the Expanding Circle, Chinese English, to assess the implications of the Lingua Franca Core for these varieties that have developed their own styles of pronunciation that increasingly distinguish them from Inner Circle styles of pronunciation.Â
Legacies of War in Current Diasporic Sri Lankan Women’s Writing
Full text linkSince the end of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, Sri Lankan writers have sought to come to terms with the long-running war and its violent conclusion. This essay considers three recent novels by Sri Lankan diasporic women: Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012), Chandani Lokugé’ s Softly, As I Leave You (2012) and Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014). Each of these novels focuses on the trauma of the war and the way that the war has affected and continues to affect those in the diaspora as well as in the homeland. Moreover, the novels provide a comparative view of the diaspora’s relation to the war, as Munaweera is resident in North America, Salgado in the United Kingdom, and Lokugé in Australia. In keeping with this issue’s theme – “from compressed worlds to open spaces†– my essay explores how South Asian women writers address the Sri Lankan war in the open spaces of the transnational Sri Lankan diaspora. As all three novels suggest, the end of the military conflict has not ended the need to understand the quarter-century of violence that preceded it. Diasporic women writers continue to intervene in a still fraught ethnopolitical situation, as all three novels deal with questions of loss, violence, trauma and the persistence of the conflict in the diaspora