In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson makes the point that ‘nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of o...

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Hegemony, national allegory, exile: The poetry of Shirley Lim

Fifty years or so after the inception of postcolonial studies as a field of inquiry, the issues of nation and narration, place and displacement, uprooting and re-rooting remain major paradigms for postcolonial concern and critique. The processes of mobility, transfer, adaptation, resistance, and change inherent in these postcolonial realities are challenging and transforming traditional understandings of identity and the cultural boundedness of the nation. A crucial dimension of these contemporary postcolonial realities is rooted in the processes of diaspora--dislocation, relocation, translocation--be it those unleashed by the population transfers of the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, which saw the massive displacement of peoples from India and China to serve colonial economic interests, or the post-World War II, and ongoing, migrations of people into North America, Australia, and Western Europe. Indeed, the question of how diasporic groups are positioned with reference to their histories and old homelands as well as how they position themselves in relation to their new locations has made the process of cultural translocation a complex form of signification. Homi Bhabha articulates his understanding of the heim of national culture in terms not of "unisonance" but of translocative dissonance--the splits, fractures, and othernesses within the nation, produced by diaspora. These are powerfully invoked by his coinage "dissemiNation" (see the essay of this name in Nation and Narration, 291-322). Similarly, Salman Rushdie defines home as a "scattered" concept also in order to reject the nationalist mythology of an originary and unitary identity band, choosing instead to align himself with the idea of the "disseminated" nation and its fissured histories (East 93). The complex confluence of inside and outside, past and present, indeed of the "genealogies of dispersion and 'staying put'" (Brah 209), have produced new identities, new social and cultural configurations that are "neither the one nor the other but something else besides" (Bhabha, Location 25). In this (re)conceptualization of nation and identity, diasporic groups have not only changed themselves by picking up new accentuations and becoming established as distinctively Canadian or British or American or Malaysian, but also begun to reconfigure the very meaning of those terms. Such changes in the way diasporic communities view their identity and their place and status in their nation attest to their dynamism as well as their transformative capacity to construct a national culture of creative and selective adaptation in ways that resist total assimilation into the dominant culture. Diasporic groups are able to reform both themselves and the dominant cultural influences working upon them, allowing them to not only engage with but also create new meanings, new maps of desire and of attachment in other landscapes. This is true of Malaysia, where the descendants of colonial immigrants have created new forms of identification and allegiance that have problematized the very authority and coherence to which the term "national identity" lays claim. No longer do these second-, third-, or fourth-generation heirs of the migrations engendered by colonialism think of themselves as temporary sojourners in their nation. They are a people whose identity is no longer defined by a sense of loss, cultural impoverishment, or the absence of a homeland. With this conception of the translocative effects of diaspora in mind, this essay aims at examining the literary productions of author K.S. Maniam with reference to their persistent reconfigurations and transgressions of the dominant narrative of a Malaysian national and cultural identity. In doing so I wish to move away from the hegemonic notion of diaspora as a discourse of exile, cultural loss, and unsettledness towards a reading of diaspora as a discourse of attachment, rootedness, and national desire. …

Diasporic Translocation and "The Multicultural Question" in Malaysia

Recent developments in the local literary arts scene have seen the emergence of publications on folktales and fables of Malaysian indigenous people in English. Central to these publications is the presence of animals, whether as symbols, voices, or characters. Nonetheless, critical reaction to this presence has been sparse at best. As animals are paradoxically recognised as central to indigenous societies and their literatures yet marginalized in relation to human concerns, analysing texts to see how these animals function in literature, what they teach us about animals and what they reveal about humans and our relationships to animals seem critically crucial. Tapping into the field of animal studies, this paper investigates animal tropes in Malaysian indigenous folktales in English. To this end, folktale collections from such as Heidi Munan’s Sarawak Folktales (2017), Lim Boo Liat and Jefri Dylan Ong’s Orang Asli Animal Tales (2016), Clifford Sather’s Apai Alui Becomes A Shaman and Other Iban Comic Tales (2001), Robert Sulis Ridu, Ritikos Jitab and Jonas Noeb’s King Siliman and Other Bidayuh Folk Tales (2001), and Jayl Langub’s Suket: Penan Folk Stories (2001) are examined. Using Mario Ortiz Robles’s framework of animal tropes, this research found that the majority of these animal tropes are anthropomorphized or shown as possessing human capacities, such as conversing, dancing, working, and interacting with others, indicating Malaysian literary animals as literary, cultural endeavours which largely involve a projection of humanity.

From jungles and rivers: animal tropes in malaysian indigenous literature in english

The aim of this paper is to investigate the different worlds of the Malaysian writers Wong Phui Nam and K.S. Maniam, especially those found in their early writing in terms of space, place and even time. It is interesting to note that Wong's metonymical connections with his landscape are not unlike K.S. Maniam's borderland correlations to his spiritual jungle-scape found in some of his important prose narratives. While these two writers appear to have very little in common, especially in terms of their depictions of landscape and consciousness, it would not be too much of a stretch of the imagination to notice that Wong's poetics of space are at times not too different from Maniam's evocation of the early Malayan landscape. An important consideration here would be both writers' attempts at depicting the new Malaya in their work, where both have had to face the task of reimagining the nation in terms of a postcolonial space and place. Wong evokes a terrifying landscape within which half-monsters, absent gods, superstitions and rumour dwell. It is amidst this outer turmoil that the poet evokes a 'persona-self' who struggles to achieve some kind of psycho-social wholeness of being, though often he is to be seen wandering the bleak wilderness both from without and within. Moments of self-transformation and even release are rare; and so too the poet's search for cultural meaning within his newly independent nation. However, within Maniam's highly evocative jungle-scapes, the potential for meaning and cultural transformation is always present, whether or not it appears to torment his many protagonists in the forms of cultural trope or, more specifically, the colonial myth of belonging from within different sectarian groups. The physical landscape evoked in his writing often suggests a relationship with a more numinous world where the superstitions, folk traditions and the various religions of the land come together to provide as much mystique as potential for redemption from the rough, geographical terrain of the tropical forest.

Journeying into the "Dark Country": Exploring Wong Phui Nam's and K.S. Maniam's Fictive Worlds of Redemption and Despair

Maniam, K. S.

Achieving a collective sense of belonging in the pluralistic society of Malaysia, whose political systems and social directives are very much controlled by the dominant Malay bumiputra ethnic group, remains a desirable but highly problematic goal A shared identity that is acceptable to all 6f the ethnic groups in Malaysia cannot be forced, but rather involves a gradual re-invention of self through embracing a range of alterities One such path to forming a national consciousness that does not diminish further the (marginalized) individual's identity involves establishing a reverential bond with the landscape through a fraught return to the core of ancestral memory This article looks at the literary attempts of KS Maniam, an Indian-Malaysian and the leading English-language writer in Malaysia, to navigate a path from Malayan independence in 1957 towards a contemporary identity that meshes hisIndian roots, his diasporic consciousness, and his vision of what self and nation constitute in a Malaysian context

Memory, myth, exile: The desire for Malaysian belonging in K.S. Maniam's The Return , "Haunting the Tiger' and In A Far Country

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Memory, myth, exile: The desire for Malaysian belonging in K.S. Maniam's The Return , "Haunting the Tiger' and In A Far Country