Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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English in Malaysia: Identity and the Market Place
Full text linkThe paper examines Malaysian and Singaporean state policies and examples of literary works that directly or indirectly address the position of English to analyse some of the discursive contradictions and tensions undergirding the use of English in their societies. Contention over the role of English, rejected as a colonial threat to national identity – constructed as essentialist Malay monolingualism – has historically and continuously riven state, public and literary policies and discourse in Malaysia. Ee Tiang Hong's early work articulates the dilemma of the Malaysian Anglophone poet whose voice is critiqued as mimicry of “foreign†tongues. Muhammad Haji Salleh emerged as an elite Malay intellectual with his unnuanced disavowal of English use in Malaysia as a dark psychological depredation of the national soul. This total English language rejection, however, is called into question and undermined by his later bilingual practice of dual Malay and English publications of his work and his praise for the two language rivers that compose him as a single poet-subject. English is now viewed as an instrumental language necessary for competing in the global economy. In Singapore, where this instrumentalist language policy remains uncontested, the state has positioned Singlish, the local variation of English that serves as a major expressive marker of Singaporean identity, as a threat to global economic ambitions
Hunger, Desire and Migratory Souls: Interethnic Relations in Three Short Stories by Satur P. Apoyon
Full text linkModern Cebuano fiction comes from an oral tradition that goes back to pre-colonial Philippines. An important shift in the direction of Cebuano literature took place after the Pacific War when Visayan communities had been firmly established in Mindanao. Migration created an audience outside of Cebu and, consequently, encouraged writing that depicted the migrant's life. In turn, realities that spring from the history and cultures of Mindanao came to be represented in Cebuano fiction with relative care and integrity. Satur P. Apoyon was among the Visayan writers who consciously sought to describe realities in Mindanao using a Cebuano literary tradition.  This essay examines three short stories from Apoyon's Ang Gakit Ni Noebong Ug Ubang Mga Sugilanon (Noebong's Raft and Other Stories). These stories feature interethnic relations between a Visayan and a Bagobo in “Dili Alang Kang David Ang Baboy Ihalas†(The Wild Boar is Not for David) and a Maguindanao and a Teduray in “Ang Jihad ni Hadji Aribani†(Hadji Aribani's Jihad). “Mga Gutom†(The Hungry Ones) describes a symbolic relationship between human and animal that portrays an analogous dynamic found in the stories about settlers and the indigenous.  This essay will employ Resil B. Mojares's concept of the Filipino writer's wandering soul (“The Haunting of the Filipino Writer†300) to describe a trauma that Apoyon's fiction repeatedly re-enacts in the form of encounters between characters from different ethnic groups. Using Mojares's lens, the three stories will be read as being “haunted†by the spectre of the Lumad: the indigenous peoples of Mindanao whom migrants from Luzon and the Visayas had displaced after waves of migration that occurred during the American colonial period
Persuratan Baru: An Alternative Paradigm to Western Literary Methodologies
Full text linkAs an ex-colony of Britain, the Malay literary world exhibits an intellectual rush to imbibe Western literary constructs at the expense of local literary tradition which, informed by Islam, has spanned centuries. These Western constructs, which contradict both Malay culture and Islam, the religion of the Malays, give rise not only to confusion of knowledge and epistemology (in particular the concept of literary function and aesthetics), but also reinvent new values and structures of literary form and practice. Malay literature thus takes on an unmistakably Western hue and identity. In the face of this foreign onslaught, local scholars feel an urgent need to revive analytical frameworks that are cognisant of Islamic precepts and Malay cultural dynamics. This is seen as a means to bring back to Malay literature the Islamic worldview and identity which have been eclipsed, and, in some cases, jettisoned altogether. One such framework is Persuratan Baru (Genuine Literature) or PB which is informed by the concept of taklif, principally accountability to God through observation of the syariah or Islamic jurisprudence. Persuratan Baru re-orientates Malay creative and critical writings by challenging the primacy of the story as the lynchpin of fiction. In its place, PB prioritises knowledge as the main organising principle of narrative on the one hand, and stylisation of ideas, with discourse positioned as a crucial tool of articulation, as an integrated method of foregrounding ideas in creative terms, on the other
The Small Voices of History and the Middle Class Academia: Notes Towards Promises and Pitfalls
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