Transnational re-memorialization in Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day

ABSTRACT

Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day (2008) traces the Rajasekharans’ family history over three generations and re-memorializes the racial riots of May 13, 1969 from a Malaysian Indian perspective. Compared to an earlier phase of memorialization in Malaysia’s national discourse about racial and cultural identity, the novel engages in the process of re-memorialization from a transnational locus, that brings together the material contexts of the Anglo American publishing industry as well as Samarasan’s racialized belonging to her homeland as a mobile Malaysian. This doubly transnational frame is defined by a strong sense of injustice from a revisionist perspective, one that obscures the complex history behind Malaysia’s public discourse on race and reproduces the essentialism of racial categories. The novel’s regressive temporality is also a critique of Malaysia’s non-progression on issues of race, as much as it forecloses other ways of rethinking racialization in Malaysia.

KEYWORDS:

• Preeta Samarasan
• Malaysian Indian
• transnational
• memory
• race
• mobility

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No pontential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Ann Ang

Ann Ang is a DPhil candidate in English at Wadham College, University of Oxford and researches contemporary anglophone writing from India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. She is interested in the evolution of English(es), narrative structures, and the theorizing of world literature(s). Her articles and reviews have previously appeared in New Mandala, the Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation Review and Pedagogies: An International Journal, with a chapter forthcoming in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies.