Interracial relations and the post-postcolonial future in Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad

ABSTRACT

Malaysian supernatural and fantasy fiction typically belong to culture-specific mythologies that stay within the limits and boundaries of race and ethnicity. Zen Cho’s collection of fantasy short fiction Spirits Abroad, however, defies these limits and boundaries – and indirectly the ethnocentric politics of Malaysia – through representations of interracial and interspecies relationships. Exploring the emotional connections between human and magical or supernatural beings in selected stories, this article examines Cho’s subversive vision and articulation of an other-Malaysia that is made up of interstitial spaces and hybridized identities, and where the hierarchies and boundaries between native and migrant, self and other are dissolved. Her revisionary narratives not only contribute to the decolonizing of postcolonial Malaysia’s binary discourses and narratives of race and ethnicity, but are also essential to the imagining of a post-postcolonial Malaysian future.

KEYWORDS:

• Zen Cho
• fantasy
• interstitial
• interracial
• post-postcolonial
• Malaysia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Grace V.S. Chin

Grace V.S. Chin is senior lecturer in English language studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia. She specializes in postcolonial Southeast Asian literatures in English, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, and/or class in contemporary societies and diasporas. Her works have been featured in refereed journals that include the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, World Englishes, and Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back: Gender, Identity and Nation in the Literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines (2018) and Appropriating Kartini: Colonial, National and Transnational Memories of an Indonesian Icon (2020). She recently published an edited volume, Translational Politics in Southeast Asian literatures: Contesting Race, Gender, and Sexuality (2021).