The postcolonial millennium: New directions in Malaysian literature in English

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In 1963, the Federation of Malaysia was created with the merging of Malaya (which obtained independence from the British in 1957), Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore. However, incompatible visions of the new nation led to Singapore’s secession from the Federation in 1965.

2. Terms first used by Professor Ismail Hussein, a staunch Malay nationalist, in 1976 (Quayum [2007] 2014, 36).

3. A second-generation Punjabi Muslim in Malaysia, Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof is officially recognized as a Malay but he prefers to identify himself as an Indian migrant rather than a Malay.

4. We have used the first name for Malay writers as per the practice in Malay culture.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Grace V.S. Chin

Grace V.S. Chin is senior lecturer in English lLanguage 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).

Mohammad A. Quayum

Mohammad A. Quayum is an honorary professor (with full academic status) in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, Australia. He taught for over four decades at tertiary institutions in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US before hastily retiring from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) because of the 2020 pandemic. Author, editor, and translator of 36 books, Quayum has also published more than 120 journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopaedia entries in the areas of American literature, South Asian literature, and Southeast Asian Literature. His recent edited books on Malaysian anglophone literature include Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Companion (2020) and Reading Malaysian Literature in English: Ethnicity, Gender, Diaspora, and Nationalism (2021). He is also the co-author of Colonial to Global: Malaysian Women’s Writing in English 1940s–1990s (2001, 2003) and author of One Sky, Many Horizons: Studies in Malaysian Literature in English (2007, 2014).