Diffractive spaces: An analysis of Malaysian cyberpunk

ABSTRACT

The impact of new information technologies on Malaysian spatiality today is complicated by the ongoing processes of colonialism, which have violently disrupted old attachments to the land, leading to the imbrication of racial divisions and global capitalism. Malaysian cyberpunk, an emergent literature, “maps” these new spaces of global informational capitalism. While theories of hybridity and syncretism have been used to explain the assimilation and negotiation of culture in Malaysia, this article proposes an alternative approach. It reads the nation’s fundamentally polyvalent nature through the concept of diffraction, arguing that reading diffractively allows us to be attentive to how spaces connected to diverse ontologies impede, pass through, or interfere with one another, with differences being upheld rather than reduced. Analysing a selection of Malaysian cyberpunk short stories, this article shows how diffractive entanglements are constitutive of Malaysia’s complex spatial identity, offering an alternative spatial imaginary.

KEYWORDS:

• Malaysia
• cyberpunk
• diffraction
• spatiality
• science fiction
• difference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Isa and Shuri (2017), for example, read Malaysian SF written in Malay as an expression of ethical concerns about biotechnological advancements and the impact on Islamic values. Analysing Malaysian SF written in English, Elias and Louth (2018) suggest that selected cyberpunk stories convey anxieties about labour, the racial ordering of domestic work, and the subsequent abuse of the “other”. These engagements with SF are primarily ethical rather than literary, reading SF as an unproblematic reflection of future reality, not taking into account the formal aspects of genre.

2. Apart from metaphor, diffraction is also regarded as methodology that attends to the material engagement with information and the “relations of difference and how they matter” (Barad 2007, 71).

3. Jean Baudrillard (1994) suggests that “[s]imulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. [ ... ] It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” (1–2). Fredric Jameson (1991) suggests that the “peculiar function [of simulacra] lies in what Sartre would have called the derealization of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality” (34).

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Netty Mattar

Dr Netty Mattar currently teaches English literature at International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM). She has also taught at the National University of Singapore, where she completed her PhD. Her current research interests include contemporary and global speculative fiction, literary representations of trauma, and new approaches to world literatures in English.