Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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English and Identity in Asia
Get PDFA common assumption is that one’s mother tongue is essentially one’s ethnocultural identity.Contact by speakers of local languages with a hegemonic language such as English is therefore seen as endangering not only the local language but also threatening the identity that speakers deem closest to them. I will argue in this paper that identifying language with identity is an oversimplification. I present societal attitudes toward English in a number of East and Southeast Asian nations and discuss the roots of those attitudes. Macro-societal attitudes towards language are, however, only one factor in the construction of ethnocultural identity in face-to-face interaction. I borrow Bucholtz and Hall’s tactics of intersubjectivity to frame my case that personal identity is constructed and negotiated by language performance in oral and literate practices and it is neither determined nor fixed by the attitudes of a society toward languages
Human Rights and National Literature: A Comparative Study of the Experiences in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines
Get PDFThis paper studies the experiences encountered by three Southeast Asian nations in the face of globalisation in which nationalism is often seen as something negative and regressive. The paper analyses how these three nations strengthen the position of national literature in the face of globalisation. It also compares how minority voices attract international attention and expose themselves to two risks. One of the risks is being dominant over national literature which will likely create tension within the nation. The second risk is that of being marginalised and losing their iterary importance in their own land.    The objective of this research is to examine the validity of the argument that the “privileged voice†(often protected by national policy on language) is always the “special†one and be given its due at the national level.Â
Narrating to Survive: Ethics and Aesthetics in Githa Hariharan’s When Dreams Travel
Get PDFGitha Hariharan, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Fiction (1993), explores significant issues with regard to narrativity in her novel, When Dreams Travel. The narrator weaves around Scheherazade – or Shahrzad of the Arabian Nights – a vibrant and inventive story about a perennially played out game: the quest for love and power. Between the Sultan who wants a virgin every night and his brother who has felt the bitter taste of betrayed love exist two women, two ambitious brides, who are the sisters Shahrzad and Dunyazad, aspiring to be heroines or martyrs. The tale that unravels with all the tour-de-force of a modern myth explores a range of issues – the fallibility of narrative and the crisis involved in the act of narrativity itself. It engages with questions of ethics and the importance of aesthetics to ethics.  In my paper I shall be engaging with all of these above issues trying to explore the edge of meaning in extreme acts of narrativity such as in Shahrzad’s case and how these impact on questions of ethics and aesthetics in narratives
The Metaphors of Untouchable and Coolie in Mulk Raj Anand’s Novels Untouchable and Coolie and His Sense of Social Justice
Get PDFI have argued elsewhere that Mulk Raj Anand in his first novel Untouchable (1935) has shown that none of the western theoretical models of attaining social justice, including the Rousseauistic, the Hegelian and the Marxist models, is appropriate to theorising the tragedy of Bakha’s deterministic existence and the stubborn order that is responsible for the creation of the Bakhas of society. Ironically, the “lowest dregs†of mankind in western literatures can at least rebel, but Bakha as an untouchable cannot do so. Munno, the “hero-anti-hero†of Coolie (1936), being a Kshatriya by caste, can at least rebel. While Bakha’s complicated existence as an untouchable is situated in the varnashram structure of Hinduism, Munoo’s fate as a rickshaw-puller is tied to his dehumanising work as a coolie. The fact remains that both Bakha and Munoo are helpless labourers whose work has been permanently devalued and misappropriated. However, Anand stretches the metaphors of untouchable and coolie to suggest that we all are untouchables and coolies. I argue that the two metaphors of untouchable and coolie are universal metaphors of the sociology, history and metaphysics of human suffering and of man’s inhumanity to fellow man. Can art fully address the moral problem of human slavery, indignity and suffering? I further argue that Anand elevates the level of discourse to a moral essay on humanism where art is concerned with the truth of the human condition
"Belatedly, Asia's Literary Scene Comes of Age": Celebratory English Discourse and the Translation of Asian Literature
Get PDFOn 8 November 2007, the International Herald Tribune (IHT) triumphantly announced that “belatedly,†the Asian literary scene had “come of age.†There were two reasons for this belated success. The first was that an increasing number of literary works by Asian authors are now appearing in English or in English translations. The other was that major British and, especially, American publishing companies are now establishing branch companies in this region.    This paper will examine the discourse of the IHT article to suggest how celebratory English language constructs a particular view of literary success – success in terms of a dominant international English. This analysis will be framed within a wider context of Postcolonial Translation Studies
