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Conference on Overcoming Passions: Race, Religion and the Coming Community in Malaysian Literature, organised by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore on 11 - 12 October 2004

Updated: 22-Sep-04

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PANEL 1 – WRITERS ON MALAYSIA(N)/ WRITINGS

The Malaysian Dream: The Pessimistic View of a Bilingual Writer

Salleh Ben Joned Writer, Malaysia

[email protected]

The paper will be essentially ‘autobiographical’, in the sense that I will use my writings both in Malay and English, creative and non-creative, and the reactions to them from the Malay-reading and English-reading publics. The paper will analyse these very different reactions (in the former case a virtual non-reaction), and speculate about what they tell us about Malaysia’s multi-cultural reality. I’ll make the provocative claim that though Malay is the official National Language, English is the virtual national language, certainly among middle class Malaysians. English, now a global language, is very often spoken even by Malays among themselves, that’s partly why the overwhelming majority of my readers are the English-educated; this despite the fact that in the first edition of my bi-lingual poetry book Sajak-Sajak Saleh/Poems Sacred and Profane, two thirds of the poems are in BM. The book was not reviewed at all in any Malay publication. I feel that my way of writing poetry in Malay (the use of irony and parody in the satirical or semi-satirical poems, for example) cannot be appreciated by the majority of Malay readers; and the Malay I use, unlike that of the vast majority of Malay poets and writers, is the earthy Malay as spoken in daily life, The fact that in the second edition of the book, I increased to number of English poems so that it’s now 50/50 bi-lingual suggests something in the context of the multi-cultural reality of Malaysia. This is reinforced by the fact that my next collection, Adam’s Dream in His, which will be out before the end of the year, is entirely in English. What this means is that I believe English is much better as the medium for cross-ethnic and cross-cultural communication. I’ve also been working on a novel, and it is in English. It seems Salleh Ben Joned the bi-lingual poet and writer will perhaps cease to exist before very long. I lament is possibility. I suppose I’ll be legitimizing the ultra-nationalists’ branding of me as a Mat Saleh writer! Biodata Salleh Ben Joned is now a house-husband who writes poetry and is working on his only novel. Until two years ago, he was for many years a freelance feature-writer and columnist with, consecutively, a number of publications. As a columnist he is best known for his provocative As I Please in The New Straits Times (collected in two books, As I Please and Nothing is Sacred). The second enlarged edition of his bilingual poetry collection Poems Sacred & Profane/Sajak-sajak Saleh came out last year. As I Please was reprinted early this year. For obvious reasons Salleh has actually written more than he has published. One of the works he wrote many years ago, a play called The Amok of Mat Solo, will be done as a rehearsed reading for invited guests only by The Actors’ Studio. The decision to do this is due to the certainty felt by The Actors’ Studio that the play would be banned if a staging is attempted. Salleh’s new collection of poems, Adam’s Dream, long over-due, will come out sometime before the end of this year.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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Speaking in Tongues: The Kavyan Writers

Uthaya Sankar S. B. and S.G. Prabhawathy Malaysia

[email protected]

This paper examines the history of creative writings produced by Malaysian Indian writers in the Malay language from the early twentieth century until the emergence of the “Kayvan writers” in the late 1990’s. In comparison to their precedessors, the majority of Malaysian Indian writers who write in Malay and came onto the scene in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s were educated in the Malay medium and thus have a better command of the language. Some of these writers, however, believe that since they write in “Bahasa Melayu” (Malay language), they should also write about “budaya Melayu” (Malay culture) and Islam. They prefer to be known as “penulis bukan Melayu” (non-Malay writers), as opposed to “penulis kaum India” (Malaysian Indian writers) because, as one of them put it, “this term puts me closer to the Malays.” By the late 1990’s, a handful of these new writers had come realised that something had to be done to identify themselves in the Malaysian literary scene as “Malaysian Indian writers” and “Malaysian writers” – not merely “Non-Malay writers.” The ensuing soulsearching led to the formation of “Yayasan Sasterawan Kaum India Malaysia” (Malaysian Indian Writers’ Foundation), better known as “Kayvan”, and the production of “Sastera Kavyan” (Kavyan writings). The final section of this paper will examine the stylistics and some of the thematic preoccupation of Kayvan writers in the context of race, religion and community. Biodata Uthaya Sankar S. B. is a lecturer and “Bahasa” creative writer. He has written a few books and won several literary awards. He is the founding president of Kavyan. S.G. Prabhawathy is an English language teacher and Bahasa Malaysia creative writer. She writes short stories, poem and articles. Prabha is the secretary of Kavyan. She can be contacted at [email protected]


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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Roots and Routes: Travel and Identity

Beth Yahp Writer

[email protected] & [email protected]

“Roots and Routes: Travel and Identity” presents a personal perspective on the ‘journeying self’ referred to by Kaur et al (eds.) in Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics (Zed Books, London, 1999): a self in which life’s journey and journeys across the globe are conflated; a self manifest in both historical and contemporary Malaysian experience, given our significant im/emigrant population coupled with our ongoing defining of identity (Malaysia as a nation, Malaysians as hyphenated nationals mix-and-matched in colour-coded conceptions of ‘unity’). I’ll consider family trajectories (the personal reflecting global as well as specifically Malaysian trends of travel due to education, work, love...) as well as my own (Kuala Lumpur-Sydney-Paris-?); how these have affected/informed my creative output: the constant negotiations involved in my explorations of story, home, belonging, voice, language, representation and authenticity. A context of lived cultural hybridity has resulted in a crisscrossing of cultural borders in my prose work and works such as the opera Moon Spirit Feasting by composer Liza Lim-my libretto of which was inspired by the Chinese myth of the Moon Goddess, the Penang Hungry Ghost Festival, a Daoist sex manual in English, Chinese ideography as well as vaudeville, ‘high’ Beijing opera and Malaysian religious on-the-street rituals: which then travelled in performance to Australia, Europe and Japan. Biodata Beth Yahp was born in Malaysia of Chinese-Thai parents. She went to university in Australia when she was 20, and lived there for 14 years before moving to Paris. She is now based somewhere between Sydney, Kuala Lumpur and Paris. Her novel The Crocodile Fury (Angus & Robertson, 1992; Flamingo, 1996) won the Victorian Premier's Prize for First Fiction and the NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission Award in Australia. It has been published in Singapore and Malaysia (SIRD, 2003) and translated into several European languages.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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PANEL 2 – MALAY-MUSLIM IDENTITIES AND COSMOPOLITANISM

Autobiographical Narrative and the Emergence of a Malay Muslim Identity:

Che Husna Azhari’s The Rambutan Orchard

Amin Malak Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton

Alberta, Canada

[email protected]

As an autobiographical narrative, The Rambutan Orchard (1993) reveals Azhari’s formative experiences growing up in rural Kelantan, where her Malay milieu is permeated with the ethos of Islam. With an identity-shaping valence, Islam emerges from Azhari’s five interlinked stories as a tolerant, inclusive matrix, within which identity is not seen as a “contrast” to the other but as an organic affiliation to an idyllically caring community. The book reveals an attachment to a place, an engagement with an environment, “an orchard,” which explicitly evokes the concept of “Jannah,” the Qur’anic vision of an “orchard paradise.” Informed by the theoretical insights of Bakhtin, Foucault, and Said, my paper situates Azhari’s narrative within the context of Muslim women writing in English who often emulate the Shahrazadic model of storytelling. Azhari is thus prompted by the joy of telling stories that are retrieved, reconstructed, or reinvented for the pleasure of the exercise itself. Moreover, the narrative reveals first-hand an aspect about the Malay culture that is seldom articulated in English with such fidelity and intelligence. The blend of humour and compassion gives an added appeal to the work that celebrates rural Malaysia’s integrative identification with the culture and civilization of Islam. Biodata Dr Amin Malak teaches English and comparative literature at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He has delivered more than twenty conference papers and published more than thirty articles and reviews in books and refereed, international journals. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English, published in November 2004 by the State University of New York Press.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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The Representation of Women in Selected Fiction in English by Three Contemporary Malay Muslim Women Writers

Mazni Binti Muslim & Nasirin Bin Abdillah Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia, Dungun


This paper investigates and analyses the representation of women characters in contemporary Anglophone women’s writing in Malaysia by three Malay Muslim writers: Che Husna Azhari, Dina Zaman and Ellina Abdul Majid. The approach used in the study is based on an Islamic theoretical framework, focusing on Islamic principles found in the Quran, Prophetic Hadith and Sunnah and Muslim writers’ scholarly writings. The discussion of the writers’ works in terms of Islamic message and articulation shows that Islamic mores and values are still embedded in their writings. They are consciously aware of their identities as Muslim writers despite exposure to Western education and years of living abroad. In relation to the characterization of women, predominant themes and women-centred topics, the paper also suggests that the writers are writing as women, conscious of their female identities while depicting various portraits of women who faced all kinds of problems and heartaches in facing challenges in the dynamic changing of Malaysia’s coming community. Biodata Nasirin B. Abdillah is a Malaysian Lecturer of English Language at Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia, Terengganu Branch, Dungun Campus. He is currently pursuing his Master’s in English Literature at University of Malaya, Malaysia. Mazni Muslim is a Malaysian Lecturer of English Language at Universiti Teknologi MARA Malaysia of Terengganu Branch, Dungun Campus. She has completed her MHSc in Literary Studies at International Islamic University Malaysia.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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Of Kopitiams and Mamak Stalls: Cosmopolitan Representational Spaces in Malaysian Film and Television

Khoo Gaik Cheng Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Independent Malaysian films offer a notion of subjectivity that is (in)formed by and performed through geographical and temporal space. The post-1969 generation of independent Chinese Malaysian filmmakers who grew up during the developmentalist era of the 1990s is not necessarily interested in representing multiethnicity, racial tolerance or inter-racial relationships. While cross-ethnic alliances figure in the film credits, ‘race’ is not foregrounded. Rather, racial/ethnic diversity is a given, and sensitive cross-ethnic representations result from the cosmopolitan perspectives of these filmmakers. Working from a combination of rooted cosmopolitanism and spatial theory, this paper offers a possible alternative route to think outside of racial pluralism in Malaysia by focusing on the coffeeshop (‘kopitiam’ in hokkien) as a potential iconic cosmopolitan space. As a cosmopolitan space that welcomes diversity and cross-racial and -religious critical discourse, ‘kopitiam’ has become a generic signifier of Malaysian cultural diversity used by Malaysian restaurants abroad as well as to form internet forums that open up spaces for civil society. An integral part of the daily Malaysian landscape, the kopitiam becomes a kind of “representational space” (Lefebvre) for young independent filmmakers: a timeless space filled with nostalgia and imbued with imaginary and imagined qualities of community. I will focus on two independent animation shorts, Coffeeshop and Don’t Play Play, and the television series, Kopitiam (which began in 1998). Simultaneously, I will also root these representations to the real-text of coffeeshops in order to explore further race, religion and the coming community and to theorise: if public spaces like the kopitiam were once historically cosmopolitan (demonstrating an openness to diversity without fear of food pollution), or still are in certain places, or that such cosmopolitan spheres have shifted to mamak stalls in order to accommodate Muslim friends, perhaps “the coming community” always already existed and still exists in exceptional quarters. Thus, perhaps instead of longing for a reverse in racist policies and racialist thinking accumulated through colonial history and postcolonial continuance of racialised structures, we should be thinking ahead through and beyond race while expanding cosmopolitan mental and geographical spaces in Malaysian culture. Biodata A graduate of Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia, Canada, Khoo Gaik Cheng is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore where she is revising her dissertation into a book, Recuperating Adat in 1990s Malaysian Film and Literature. For her new project, she combines cosmopolitanism and spatial theories in thinking about independent filmmaking in Malaysia. Her broader interests include watching and thinking about Southeast Asian cinemas within cultural and political contexts.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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PANEL 3 – CONTESTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES

Bangsa Malaysia and the Reterritorialization of Race at the Limits of Empire

Mohan Ambikaipaker Department of Anthropology and the African Diaspora Program

University of Texas, Austin

[email protected]

The official incorporation of the neo-multicultural discourse of “bangsa Malaysia” into a post-New Economic Policy ideology coincides with the historical conjuncture variously termed as “neoliberalism,” “globalization,” or in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's conceputalization – “Empire.” This moment signals a shift in the articulation and social formation of markets, states and human subjectivity. Initially hailed as progressive turn from Malay-centric and assimilationist discourse of nation-building, the concept of “bangsa Malaysia” traces a genealogy to left-wing anti-colonial nationalist discourse in the literary works of writers such as Usman Awang and Lloyd Fernando. But official appropriation of the term as a means of forging social solidarity in an era of the state's retreat from social justice and ethnic redistribution has not resulted in the absence of racialized schisms and polarizing politics in Malaysia. To what extent is “bangsa Malaysia” a post-racial discourse, or is race paradoxically becoming re-territorialized within contemporary social processes? This paper performs an interdisciplinary discussion of this problematic through literary and ethnographic examples. Biodata Mohan Ambikaipaker is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology and the African Diaspora Program at the University of Texas, Austin. He is currently engaged in ethnographic research on black coalition and cultural politics between African and Asian communities in London. He was formerly theatre critic at The Edge, and has worked on colonial racial formations, Malaysian theatre and the playwright, Leow Puay Tin.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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At the Junction: Negotiating Multiethnic Histories in Echoes of Silence, A Malaysian Novel

Suvendrini Perera Faculty of Media, Society and Culture

Curtin University, Australia

[email protected]

In a review of Chuah Guat Eng’s Echoes of Silence, A Malaysian Novel, June Mo proposes that “the diversity of peoples is indigenous to the mind of the Malaysian, but a shy chimera to approach in art.” This paper explores the space Mo’s remark opens up between peoples’ everyday knowledges of Malaysian society and its cultural representations. How do texts like Echoes of Silence produce Malaysian multiethnicity, operating both with and against the construct of a “national” Malaysian identity and official policies of “multiculturalism?” The paper draws on my research on “junction zones,” those spaces (geocultural, psychic, symbolic) where multiethnicity is negotiated through “practices of inhabitance.” Michel De Certeau and Luce Giard discuss the city as “the stage for a war of narratives” where the narrative of a dominant culture is continually undermined by the practices of people living in shared spaces. For de Certeau and Giard these various “practices of inhabitance” make up a counter-history of “national heritage.” As they disrupt the positioning of diverse ethnic groups in the hierarchical time and space of a singular national story, how do narratives of multiethnic space such as Echoes of Silence contribute to the formation of new social identities and relations? Biodata Suvendrini Perera (Communication and Cultural Studies, Curtin University, Australia) completed her BA at the University of Sri Lanka and her PhD at Columbia University, New York. She has published widely on a range of topics relating to race, ethnicity and multiculturalism. Her essays have appeared in Cultural Studies, The Journal of Intercultural Studies, Social Identities, Discourse, The Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Race & Class. She is a contributor to a number of major anthologies of cultural studies and is author of Reaches of Empire (Columbia UP) and editor of Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities/ Ethnicities/ Nationalities (Meridian). In addition to Curtin University, she has taught at La Trobe University, the National University of Malaysia and the City University of New York, and featured as a keynote speaker at a number of national and international conferences. Her current research interests are in histories of coexistence in multiethnic societies.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

9


The Ideological Fantasy of British Malaya

Daniel Goh University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

[email protected]

Chatterjee argues that the inheritance of the Western, liberal state repressed the multiple possibilities of national communities imagined by anti-colonial movements. Whither the postcolonial in Malaysia given that British “indirect rule” constructed a non-liberal state operating on the distinction between inner-spiritual-Malay and outer-material-British? The problem of post/colonial disarticulation of imaginative possibilities resides not in the form of the state, but in that the colonial state was formed in the space Žižek calls “ideological fantasy”. Between racial discourses articulating the rule of difference and the materialities of Malay resistance and Chinese presence British rule re-structured social relations in Malaya through the realist illusion of its capitalist imperialism. The doubled illusion of British Malaya rendered the latter a natural (unconscious) historical progression, controlled the jouissance of imperial (racist) violence, produced the desire to civilize the tropics, concealed the traumatic Malay-Chinese-Indian-British antagonisms of colonial society, and overdetermined its very authors’ imaginary identifications with “the natives.” I analyze this ideological fantasy through a reading of British Malayan literature produced by colonial statesmen Frank Swettenham and Hugh Clifford (1890s-1900s) and Cecil Clementi’s decentralization policy texts (1930s), which defined the post/colonial Federation. Does the Malaysian postcolonial suggest symptomatic déjà vu enunciations, returning repressed (native) elements, or awakenings from the fantasy? Biodata Daniel Goh is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Senior Tutor at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. He has published on religious fundamentalism and on the politics of the environment in Singapore. He is currently performing a comparative study of ethnographic discourse and colonial state formation in Malaya and the Philippines for his dissertation thesis. His theoretical interests range from Marxist and post-Marxist perspectives to postcolonial and psychoanalytic cultural theories.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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PANEL 4 – TRANSNATIONAL SAMENESS/OTHERNESS

Love and Vertigo: Is the Malaysian Writer in English Postcolonial?

Adeline Koh University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

[email protected]

Through a symptomatic reading of the transnational Malaysian novel Love and Vertigo by Teo Hsu Ming, I will explore the question: “What does it mean for a contemporary Malaysian writer to write literature in English?” This reading will allow me to posit that there exists a particular disavowal of the colonial condition within contemporary trans-national Malaysian literature in English, the colonial condition being the dependency-complex of the colonized narrative, articulated by many critics such as Frantz Fanon and Chinua Achebe. What does this mean for Malaysian “postcoloniality”, therefore, specifically the construction of “Malaysia” as nation and community after colonialism? My reading will explore this disavowal through the use of Slavoj Žižek’s theories of ideological fantasy. Love and Vertigo is especially interesting for this reading as it takes place in three locations: Malaya/Malaysia, Australia and Singapore, allowing us to ask questions such as how globalization and different cultural diasporas play into the ideological construction of “Malaysia” as community, and the relevance of transnationalism to (1) the dependence on “Western” aesthetic forms and the (2) simultaneous disavowal of this dependence. The novel is held together by the narration of the life of Pandora, a Malaysian Chinese woman who grows up in a Catholic convent from a traditional Straits Chinese family, and who is forced to negotiate identities such as “whiteness”, “Chineseness”, “Malaysianness” and “Australianness” in her lifetime. Does this novel allow one to posit that the point de capiton (what cannot be voiced in order to be the underlying condition of the whole) of the the newly imagined community of Malaya is after all colonialism? Biodata Adeline Koh is a Ph.D. student in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her main interests are postcolonialism, theories of globalization and modernity, cultural translation, Marxist theory and Southeast and East Asian Studies. She is currently working on a project on the remnants of colonial racialization in colonial and postcolonial English literature, and its implications for contemporary political debates such as “Asian Values”.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

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Fragmented (Post-)Identities: Lin Xingqian’s Poetics of Diaspora

Tee Kim Tong Sun Yat-sen University

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

[email protected]

The paper is part of my project of constructing an Asian/Asian American poetics of diaspora. A strong sense of changing places, or being out of place, illuminates the transnational and transcultural nature of such a poetics. As a member of diasporic Chinese/Asian American poets, Lin Xingqian, Chinese Malaysian poet-essayist living in Hong Kong, expresses in his poetical works his diasporic/fragmented identity and postmodern/postcolonial ethnicity. This paper will explore how Lin (re)claims his identity and subjectivity through such a poetics of diaspora. In his poetic writings, Lin takes his readers on a poetic journey of “aphasia” affected by migration and marginalization, and shows us how the loss of language, identity and homelands influences the paradoxical (de)construction of his (fragmented) (post-)identities. Biodata Tee Kim Tong is Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University at Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He is the author of Nanyang lunshu: Mahua wenxue yu wenhua shuxing [Studying Southeast Asian Chinese: Chinese Malaysian literature and cultural identity] and editor of The Renaissance Fantasy: Arts, Politics and Travel (with Francis K.H. So and Wang I-chun) and Zhongxie Mahua wenxueshi lunwenji [A collection of essays on the rewriting of Chinese Malaysian literary history].


Updated: 22-Sep-04

12


A Passion for Other Lovers: The Transformation of Occidentalist Stereotyping

in Ooi Yang-May’s Fictionalisation of Malaysia

Tamara S. Wagner Division of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

[email protected]

The proposed paper examines orientalist and occidentalist stereotypes in novels by Malaysian women writers. The figure of the “exotic” lover functions as an epitome of cross-cultural exchanges, while it turns orientalist clichés of the “other” woman inside out. At their best, recent novels expose orientalist and occidentalist typecasting as discursively constituted to engender self-referential expositions on the problematics of writing about and marketing multiculturalism. Through a close reading of Ooi Yang-May’s two recent novels, The Flame Tree (1998) and Mindgame (2000), I shall critically re-examine the representation of passion for otherness and sameness in both locally and globally published fiction, outlining the ways in which they differ and the methods Ooi’s texts harness to transcend their juggling with neo-orientalist and/or occidentalist stereotypes. In building on studies of orientalism (Said) and hybridity (Robert Young; Homi Bhabha) as well as on recent re-examinations of what Graham Huggan has termed the “postcolonial exotic,” the paper aims to extend and redefine a theory of occidentalism (Chen Xiaomei) that casts a different light on the developments and potentials of Malaysian Anglophone fiction and its representation of ethnicity and the multicultural community. Biodata Tamara S. Wagner (PhD Cambridge, 2002) is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), NTU, Singapore. She is the author of Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel (2004) and The Financial Straits: Occidentalism in Fictions of Singapore and Malay(si)a, 1800-2003 (forthcoming). Her previous publications include articles on the cultural and clinical discourses of nostalgia, the origins of occidentalism, and the functions of commerce in fiction as well as chapters on Singaporean and Asian-American writers. Wagner’s latest projects are a book-length study of the myths, or fictions, of financial, domestic, and colonial speculation in nineteenth-century literature and research on the changing discourses of occidentalism. She is currently also editing a collection of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century consumption, tentatively titled Consuming Culture: Food Fictions and the Consumption of Western Modernity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

13

PANEL 5 – CHINESENESS, INDIANNESS, MALAYNESS

Cultural Imagination and Chinese-ness in the Works of Li Yongping

Lin Pei-Yin Department of Chinese Studies

National University of Singapore

[email protected] Issues surrounding cultural identity have been the most significant topics in contemporary Chinese Malaysian literature. Li Yongping’s works are no exception. This paper intends to investigate the cultural imagination and Chinese-ness in Li Yongping’s novels through detailed textual analysis. It consists of four parts. The first part reviews the various Malaysian writers in Taiwan to highlight Li Yongping’s position in this extremely rich school of writing. The second part focuses on Li Yongping’s earlier works Lazi fu (A Lazi Woman) and Jiling chunqiu (The Jiling Chronicles), exploring how Li’s cultural imagination has changed from the portrait of local women in the former to the idealized and abstract mother in the latter. The third part investigates Li Yongping’s Haidong qing (A Fable of Haidong) and his recent work Yuxue feifei (The Falling of Rain and Snow). It concentrates on Li’s wondering theme, his concerns about Taipei, and his representation of the young girl Zhu Ling. The last part scrutinizes the relationship between the imagined China, the Chinese mothers, and the Chinese language in Li’s writings. Li’s different linguistic strategies including the use of local language in A Lazi Woman, the linguistic purification in The Jiling Chronicles, and the hybridity in Haidong qing will be analyzed. This paper also looks at how Li’s obsession with the Chinese characters can be seen as an expedience regarding his predicament of diaspora, and traces his spiritual journey departing from the Borneo, via Taipei, to the latest subtle equilibrium between these two places. Biodata Lin Pei Yin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD from University of London and was a postdoctoral research fellow and part-time lecturer at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests and areas of specialization include modern and contemporary Chinese literature (especially Taiwanese fiction), cultural studies, and comparative literature.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

14


“Your Memories are Our Memories” Remembering Culture as Race in K.S. Maniam’s Between Lives

David C.L. Lim Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Unlike K.S. Maniam’s first two novels, The Return (1981) and In A Far Country (1993), his third novel, Between Lives (2003) leaves little ambiguity where the narrative intent is concerned. The way in which the text resolves the key characters’ dilemma strongly suggests that the aim is to convince the reader that one should not forget one’s “own” culture because to forget is to be exiled from oneself and to live an ungrounded life. In this paper, I want to reframe what is presented in Between Lives as a proposition into a problematic. That is, if the text poses the question of whether one should inherit a cultural past beyond one’s personal past, and answers in the affirmative, I want to read that not as a prescription to be accepted without question but as the inscription of an ethical dilemma to be resolved by the reader. My intention is not to argue, contra Maniam, that we are able to cut ourselves off completely from the past. Rather I want to examine how our memory of the past comes to be ours in the first place. Within the context of Malaysia’s identity politics, and drawing from Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben, I want to question firstly, if the roots we remember as ours really do precede and determine us in ways beyond our control; second, if they are not in fact a euphemism for race; and third, if our roots/culture/race are not ultimately ours to remember only insofar as we volitionally posit them as ours in an act of decision for which we are always fully responsible. Biodata David C.L. Lim obtained his doctorate from the Australian National University in 2003 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His current research interests include critical theories of community, ethics and alterity in Malaysian and Southeast Asian literatures, and filmic representations of race and masculinity.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

15


Familial Communities and Urban Culture: Jessica in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Nurul Farhana Low University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur

[email protected]

In the Instant Café Theatre (ICT) 2000 production of The Merchant of Venice, transposed to modern-day Kuala Lumpur, the Jews, embodied by Shylock and his daughter Jessica, are substituted for traditional Taoist Chinese, while the Christians are essentially the Malay-Muslim Melayu Baru. In this paper I want to focus on Jessica who represents the individual caught in the trade-off between cultures. Jessica betrays her father Shylock, gives up her Taoist-Chinese identity, and embraces the Muslim religion in order to marry Lorenzo, who is a Malay-Muslim. Her betrayal of her father Shylock is thus a rejection of all he represents: her ethnic and cultural roots, which she forsakes in embracing a new religion. I want to examine why she finds her familial community, as presented in the play, so repulsive and why the particular alternative she chooses proves so alluring. More importantly, I want to interrogate what the implications are for hybridized members of urban Malaysian society like Jessica who surrender, in the name of ‘passion’, to state-imposed codes which regulate race and religion. Is their newly acquired ‘identity’ ethically supportable? How has the New Economic Policy contributed to the trend for young ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’ Malaysians to adopt Islam and can it be seen as a form of fiscal coercion, pressurizing distaff elements of Malaysian culture to conform to the government sanctioned and economically advantaged and ideologically ‘correct’ majority? Biodata Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah holds an MPhil in Critical Theory from the University of Birmingham. She is currently a PhD candidate at University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her area of research is Shakespeare in Malaysia. Nurul is also a Fellow with the Academic Staff Training Scheme, University of Science Malaysia in Penang.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

16

PANEL 6 – POETRY AND AGENCY

Strategies of “Containment” and “Liberation”: Rereading Wong Phui Nam’s How the Hills Are Distant

Leonard Jeyam University of Kent, UK

[email protected]

The point of this paper is twofold. I will first ask and demonstrate two leading questions: Does Wong’s use of modernist myth (or a mythic mentality) in “How the Hills Are Distant” lead to a moral and political nonviablity in the postcolonial context, in that his idea of man as a solitary being diminishes somewhat the notion of his participating in society as a social being? Are we left at the end of the poetic sequence with just the theme of resignation, isolation, and the failed attempts at recreating some sort of “lost Eden”? Then I will look at what an early Malaysian writer like Wong would have had to face as regards the competing ideological tensions of “containment” (as put forward by Orientalist writers and their writings on “other” cultures, which has been made famous by critics such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said) and “liberation” which, instead of always depicting the postcolonial writer as the eternally exiled alien, has been employed in recent times to great effect by writers such as Desai and Rushdie and critics like Bill Ashcroft to debunk many mythic and containing strategies. I will also be asking if Wong was in a position to shape these ideologies or be shaped by them and, in so doing, demonstrate how in some rare moments he manages to avoid the employment of a static history of his land to refute the ideology of containment by suggesting a metaphorical hope of transforming his present, culture and people, thus liberating himself from an atmosphere of self-loathing and an antagonistic other to one of a sympathetic self capable of understanding his homeland from a new perspective. Biodata Leonard Jeyam teaches literature and creative writing at the Department of English, University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur. He is currently in England reading for a PhD.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

17


Race and Postcolonial Poetry: The Case of Ee Tiang Hong

Rajeev S. Patke Department of English Language and Literature


[email protected]

The paper will address the broad question of how ethnicity, when politicized, affects literary writing, by looking at a specific case, the career of the Malaysian poet Ee Tiang Hong. Born in Malacca, of Peranakan descent, Ee went into reluctant self-chosen exile from Malaysia shortly after the events of 1968, spending the latter part of his life in Perth. His poetry returns repeatedly to what exile meant for him in terms of a triple displacement: (a) from a place that he had regarded as his home, (b) from a nation that he had felt was his country, and (c) from a people with whom he had identified until then as his community. The paper will contextualize Ee's career in terms of the conditions of writing for poets choosing English in Malaysia. Biodata Rajeev S. Patke is Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and has co-edited Institutions in Cultures: Theory and Practice (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996) and Complicities: The Literatures of the Asia-Pacific Region (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003). Recent publications include “Nationalism, Diaspora, Exile: Poetry in English from Malaysia,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38.3 (2003): 71-85. He is currently completing a commissioned book on Postcolonial Poetry in English, scheduled for publication in 2005.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

18


Malaysian Identity: The Rejected Imagination in the Poetry of Fu Chengde, Chen Qianhua and Fang Ang

Gabriel Wu Yeow Chong Department of Chinese Studies


[email protected]

The 1969 bloody racial riot and the 1987 “Operasi Lalang,” a large-scale detention of community leaders, in Malaysia had led political leaders to re-imagine the Malaysian community by giving the Malays absolute prerogative at the expense of other ethnic groups like Chinese and Indian. This transformation of national identity into racial identity has certainly hurt the Malaysian Chinese, for we see in their literature forceful articulation of anguish and sorrow of a lost generation, who have longed to differ themselves from their immigrant forebears to live as a “normal” Malaysian but are then reminded and labeled of their racial differences. With detailed textual analysis, this paper examines how contemporary Malaysian Chinese poets Fang Ang (1952- ), Fu Chengde (1959- ) and Chen Qianghua (1960- ) reject the imagination of a national community in Malaysia. Their nostalgic remembrance of bygone racial harmony, constant anxiety for skin color and language, and anticipation of a diaspoic younger generation elsewhere help establish a poetics of resistance, which enables them to confront the marginalization under the dominant force. Biodata Born in 1965, Gabriel Wu obtained his PhD degree in Chinese literature from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2000. He is currently teaching modern Chinese literature, and Chinese literature in Singapore and Malaysia in the Department of Chinese Studies, NUS. He is also the author of two poetic collections, one short story and one micro-fiction collections.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

19

PANEL 7 – MAHUA LITERATURE

A Native Plant Rooted Indigenously in the New Soil: Rereading Malaysian Chinese Literature with

Post-Colonial Reading Strategies

Wong Yoon Wah Department of Chinese Linguistics and Literature

Yuan Ze University, Taiwan

[email protected]

The first post-colonial society to develop a Chinese literature was Malaya. The emergence of a distinctive Malayan/Malaysian Chinese literature, a new kind of Chinese literature, can be seen to be the model for all later post-colonial Chinese literatures in many countries. However, Malaysian Chinese literature was accepted and is still being considered as an offshoot of the parent tree of Chinese literature of China. The organic metaphors of parent-child, stream-tributary and branch-tree imply that parents are more experienced, more important, more substantial, less brash than their offspring. Above all, they are the origin and therefore claim the final authority in question of taste and value. Such a traditional or Sinocentric reading has also made the other communities of reader in Malaysia believe that Malaysian Chinese literature cannot enjoy the status of national literature of Malaysia. The Chinese literature of Malaysia is not a branch from the Chinese Tree but a plant rooted indigenously in the new soil. Produced by Malayan and later Malaysian post-colonial society. It is in no sense continuations or simple adaptations of Chinese models. A much more profound interaction and appropriation has taken place. This post-colonial literature is a hybridized phenomenon involving dialectical relationship between the grafted Chinese cultural systems and an indigenous ontology. It has developed different characteristics from that of China and established its right to be considered independently. From a post-colonial reading perspective, many unspoken subjects may become the crucial announcements of the text. My rereading of Lao She’s Little Po’s Birthday reveals the hidden images of multi-racial society of Malaya and the theme of anti-colonialism. The novel is no longer seen as a work of ‘children literature’. The post-colonial reading strategy is useful in studying the imported and the indigenous, the two important elements in Malaysian Chinese literature. This paper will focus on the constructing of indigeneity. The Malaysian Chinese writers have been struggled hard at all time to create the indigenous, to discover what they perceived to be their original relation to the land. Biodata Wong Yoon Wah, born and brought up in Malaysia, received both his MA and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, He was Professor and Head of Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore before he retired in 2003. He is now the Dean of College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Head of Chinese Linguistics and Literature at Yuan Zhi University in Taiwan. A veteran writer who has won many literary awards including Singapore Cultural Medallion and Southeast Asia Write Award, Prof Wong’s works are in prose and poetry. As an academic, Prof Wong is a scholar of Chinese literatures o and comparative literature. He has published more than 50 international and regional refereed journal articles which are in Chinese or English. He has also published about 20 books in both Chinese and English and the latest is Post-Colonial Chinese Literatures in Singapore and Malaysia.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

20


From Old Country to New Nation: A Historical Review of Malaysian Chinese Writers in the 20th Century

Yow Cheun Hoe Centre for Chinese Language and Culture School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

[email protected]

The Chinese literature community witnessed its first sign of significant formation in British Malaya in the early twentieth century when Chinese sojourner writers and intellectuals brought in the traditions and renovations from mainland China to the local newspapers, publications, and schools. Gradually the local-born writers have emerged and numerically dominated the Chinese writing circle. The whole literature community, however, has always been caught up between China and Malaysia, where political movements and literary trends in each country often left imprints on the consciousness and practices of the writers. As such, the Malaysian Chinese writers have inevitably demonstrated dual-centered identities and sentiments. This paper is a historical review of the changing positions of China and local soil in the consciousness of Malaysian Chinese writers. It shows that in the first half of the twentieth century the Chinese writers were both politically and culturally preoccupied with the developments in China, having the passion to save the war-torn old country. It then demonstrates that in the second half of the century, following the independent movement and national building projects in Malaysia, the Chinese writers have aspired to establish local identities and embrace the new nation, although in practice they can hardly escape the literary influences emanating from Greater China including mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Biodata Yow Cheun Hoe is a research fellow at the Centre for Chinese Language and Culture, Nanyang Technological University. He has an interest in the Chinese diaspora and their relations with China. Yow is also a poet who has published literary works in Chinese newspapers in Singapore and Malaysia.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

21


A Politics of Melancholy for Malaysian Chinese Writers

Shu-chen Chiang Graduate Institute for Social Research & Cultural Studies

National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan


This paper will discuss the transformation of writing strategies for Malaysian Chinese writers during the past 40 years. I will argue that the classical representation based on a mind-body dualism in modern novels has moved to an ontologization of representation: writing now has focused on an aesthetics of transgression and a politics of (in)difference in the age of speed. Consequently, the condition of possibility of time is being problematized, and melancholic figures in some contemporary Malaysian literature inhabit the margins of global and digital forms of life, trying to retrieve any sort of value through their chronic inability to forget. Besides Benjamin’s notion of “angelus novus,” the social theorists of desire with Nietzschean inspiration such as Foucault and Deleuze will be cited for the theoretical background. Literary works by Chinese writers of English and Chinese will be used to show the transition of various strategies. The writers concerned will include Lee Kok Liang, Shirley Lim, Ng Kim Chew and Chan Tah Wei. Biodata Shu-chen Chiang is associate professor of Graduate Institute for Social Research & Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Her recent research interests are Southeast Asian Literature in English, Australian cultural studies, and critical cultural policy studies.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

22

PANEL 8 – ALTER/NATIVE

Sliding Identities and the Narrative of ‘Nation’: Select Malay Writers

Wong Soak Koon Independent Scholar, Malaysia

[email protected]

The oft-touted slogan “Ketuanan Melayu” or Malay overlordship is a rallying cry of ethnicity under perceived seige. Such a slogan elides the complexities, fissures and slidings which underlie contemporary Malay-Muslim identity. In concentrating on select Malay writers, my paper attempts to question and reflect upon the myths of ethnic purity. Any effort at overcoming passions in multi-ethnic Malaysia can perhaps begin more fruitfully with a re-examination of intra-ethnic ambivalences rather than with a replay of stereotypes of inter-ethnic confrontation. What are we like in relation to our so-called ethnic community? What constitute “communal”, “glocal” and “global” identities? How does this complex palimpsest play out in the select works of chosen Malay writers? I explore the complex imbroglio of affiliations and dis-affiliations that both burden and liberate. The works I have chosen to study are Empangan (Embankment) by Zakaria Ali, and As I Please by Salleh Ben Joned. Biodata Dr Wong Soak Koon received her PhD from the University of California (Berkeley) where she studied under a Harvard-Yenching Doctoral Fellowship. She was Fulbright Senior Fellow in the in the Women's Studies Programme (University of california, Santa Barbara) in 1998. In 2001 she carried out her research on critical literacy in the University of the Philippines (Diliman campus) under an Asian Public Intellectual fellowship funded by the Nippon Foundation. She co-edited Feminism: Malaysian Critique and Experience (1994) and Risking Malaysia: Culture, Politics and Identity (2001). She has also published on Conrad, Kipling, feminist literary and Malaysian-Singaporean Literature in English. Dr. Wong taught coomparative literature in the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia until her retirement in 2003. Her current research interests include an examination of the memoirs and writings of alternative pre-merdeka voices such as Ahmad Boestamam’s, James Puthucheary’s, Zaid Zahari’s and others.


Updated: 22-Sep-04

23

PANEL 8 – ALTER/NATIVE

Representing Marginality: The Narratives of the Bumiputra ‘Other’ The Short Stories, Novel and Poetry of Akiya, an Orang Asli Writer

Zawawi Ibrahim Institute of Malay World and Civilisation (ATMA)

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

[email protected]

This paper is an attempt to represent marginality as it is “textualised” in three literary forms, Tuntut (a collection of 8 short stories on Orang Asli, published by Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka in 2001), Sengkel (a novel on Orang Asli’s nomadic plight in the old Malay ‘feudal’ world, a forthcoming publication), and a collection of Orang Asli poetry (also forthcoming). The paper will utilise the above ‘texts’ as emic-based narratives to represent a subaltern discourse on ‘ethnicity’ and ‘identity’ from margins of the Malaysian modern nation-state. The analysis will be further informed by the author’s own anthropological works and narratives from the ‘field.’ Biodata Wan Zawawi Ibrahim received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Monash University. He is currently Professor and Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Malay World and Civilisation with research focus on Malaysian popular culture. His field of academic and research interests Malay Labour and rural peasantry; indigenous communities (Orang Asli, KadazanDusun, Penans and West Kalimantan Dayak NGO movement); AIDS, narratives on identities; and cultural studies. His recent publications include The Malay Labourer: By the Window of Capitalism (ISEAS, 1998); Cultural Contestations: Mediating Identities in a Changing Malaysian Society (Asean Academic Press, 1998) and Voices of the Crocker Range Indigenous Communities (ISEAS, 2001).

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