Universalism and the Malaysian anglophone novel: Exploring inequality, migrancy, and class in Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors

ABSTRACT

Tash Aw’s 2019 novel We, the Survivors narrates the story of a convicted killer, Ah Hock, whose life serves as a lens to refract contemporary Malaysia’s postcolonial history and its ethnic and class politics, as well as its location within the circuitry of global capitalism. This article examines Aw’s representation of migrancy, class, and inequality in contemporary Malaysian society, reading the text as a critique of global capitalism through its tactical employment of a universalist idiom that appropriates Darwinian ideas about survival, evolution, chance, environment, and competition. The text also reflects on the ethics of novel-writing since Ah Hock’s oral testimony is ostensibly mediated by a more privileged character. Aw locates his novel in the pivotal space between national specificity and general universalism while asking critical questions of his own position within the transnational literary marketplace, thereby underscoring the urgent need to re-world the world created by global capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Tash Aw
• Malaysian literature
• postcolonial literature
• inequality
• migrancy
• universalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Harmony Silk Factory, published in 2005, was Aw’s first novel; it was followed in 2009 by Map of the Invisible World. The latter features a Malaysian subplot although the book is mainly set in Indonesia.

2. Examples of articles between 2014 and 2016 include: “Malaysia’s New Immigrants”, December 11, 2014; “A Return to the Malaysian Village”, July 22, 2015; “Malaysia’s Duty to the Rohingyas”, May 27, 2015; “Malaysia’s Welcome Wears Thin”, August 26, 2015; “Malaysian’s Immigrant Worker Debate”, March 28, 2016.

3. See Lee and Leng (2018). It is likely that the actual number of foreign workers is higher, possibly 5.5 million.

4. Darwin’s thinking spawned numerous related ideologies including that of social Darwinism by British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer, which sought to apply the same laws and principles from the natural world to human society and was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term “survival of the fittest” was coined by Spencer.

5. See Harper (1999, 24). For the history of Chinese and Indian migration to Malaya in the 19th and early 20th centuries, see also Andaya and Andaya (2017).

6. See Milner (2008, 160).

7. Meaning “clean” in Malay, Bersih refers to the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections. Formed in 2005, it is a social movement that has organized a series of mass rallies over the years pressing for electoral reform, anti-corruption, and greater democracy and inclusivity in Malaysia.

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Angelia Poon

Angelia Poon is associate professor of English literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include postcolonial theory and contemporary anglophone Southeast Asian literature with a focus on issues pertaining to globalization, and gender, class, and racial subjectivities. She is the co-editor of Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts (2017), and one of the editors of Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature in English (2009). Other books include a monograph, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of Performance (2008) and the co-edited volume Sexuality and Contemporary Literature (2012). Her articles on Singapore literature and contemporary fiction have appeared as book chapters and in the journals Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Interventions, ARIEL, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Asian Studies Review.