Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Postcolonialism and the Native American Experience: A Theoretical Perspective
Get PDFTaking the common understanding of “postcolonial as independence†to task, the present paper challenges some of the fundamental assumptions circulating in the field at a theoretical level, and pleads for a radical overhauling of the postcolonial project to accommodate the indigenous peoples’ cultural resistance in the postcolonial framework. While doing so, it destabilises the very idea of a postcolonial settler literature, thereby placing it in the colonial discourse. By using native American culture as a prototype of postcolonial experience, the paper argues for the restoration of indigenous cultural practices, and then turns them into a critique of Western civilisational complexes. The attempt then is made to locate the agenda of postcolonialism in the narratives of resistance where decolonisation of mind and history is realised
Communities and Conceptual Limits: Exploring Malaysian Literature in English
Get PDFThis paper brings questions raised by a recent research project to bear on Malaysian Literature in English as a discrete object of disciplinary study. The first consideration is historical, in rethinking which groups have produced English-language writing in locations within the boundaries of the contemporary Malaysian nation-state. Literature in English at certain historical moments has promoted what Sumit Mandal has termed “transethnic solidarities.†More provocatively, however, the groups that produced such literary works may plausibly be regarded as ethnic groups in their own right, if we resist following colonial and national governmentality in positing the synonymy of ethnicity and race. The second is geographical: can we look beyond the nation-state to a region or a Malaysian diaspora, or within the nation state to discrete local traditions, as Neil Khor has recently done for Penang? The third is materialist: what happens when we think of literature in terms of its social functions and use of information technologies? Malaysian blogs and indie films that make extensive use of English are perhaps functionally closer to the literary journals of the 1950s than the latter are to contemporary Malaysian fiction
