Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Cynthia vanden Driesen and T. Vijay Kumar, eds. Globalisation: Australian-Asian Perspectives
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Marshall Moore and Xu Xi, ed. The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong
Full text linkFrancis Cooray and Khoo Salma Nasution, Redoubtable Reformer: The Life and Times of Cheah Cheang Lim
Full text link“The Intimate Enemyâ€: Schizoids in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace
No full textAmitav Ghosh opposes the “agonistic†or “reconciliatory†strand in postcolonial studies espoused amongst others by Bhabha. By fusing postcolonialism with postmodernism, this school of postcolonial thought rejects resistance. It reconfigures the historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. As a staunch anticolonialist, what Ghosh presents in his writing is the ubiquity of the Eurocentrism of the colonised. The Glass Palace represents how colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have moulded native identity and resulted in severe alienation. Self-alienation is apparent in the characters of the soldier, Arjun, who has been transformed into a war-machine in the hands of British military discourse and in the character of the Collector, a Britain-trained colonial administrator. Both these characters are destroyed: they end up in a dead end in their existential moorings and kill themselves. Ghosh genuinely attempts to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the ideological, epistemological and ontological assumptions of the imperial powers, the masks of conquest. Resistance in itself has always been an integral component of literature. Protest is simultaneously a dialogue, a deconstruction and an assertion. Literary resistance in The Glass Palace that interweaves historical-political events with individual stories thus explicates Benita Parry's critique of postcolonial discourse for its unwillingness to articulate a more oppositional politics.Â
Of Histories, Erasures and the Beloved: Glimpses into Philippine Contemporary Poetry
Full text linkTo attempt a definition of Philippine contemporary poetry is to confront its historical and literary legacies and upheavals. While it has already been said that the Philippine writing in English is one of the most expansive in Southeast Asia, this assessment remains but a strand in the country’s remarkably diverse literary milieu. There is much to be explored in the writings in Filipino —however the term may be contentious in embodying the regional languages that many of the country’s writers are now advocating so as to affirm national identity. At the same time, the American literary landscape continues to dominate the poetics of many young writers as they destabilise long held creative practices.  This essay does not aim to map a cross-section of today’s poetic production. What it offers are glimpses of the bursting energies that propel the writings among contemporary poets. Charlie Veric Samuya’s Histories (2015), Mesandel Arguelles’s Pesoa (2014), and Genevieve Asenjo’s bilingual collection Sa Gihapon, Palangga, An Uran (2014) are recent releases in English, Filipino, and Kinaray-a. The three languages give a sampling of the richness of Philippine literature in general. As individual works that mark various points in the three writers’ career, they impress by the strategies through which they execute their poetic projects. What this essay further offers is a sense of the other voices out there simply waiting to be heard
