On not writing back: Cosmopolitan paradoxes in new diasporic Malaysian writing today

ABSTRACT

In this article, two contemporary writers, Jason Eng Hun Lee and Sreedhevi Iyer, combine to reflect on emerging issues in their writing practice as deterritorialized writers with connections to Malaysia. Unlike earlier generations of post-independence writers, neither Lee nor Iyer “writes back” to the former colonial centre nor, despite their designation as “Malaysian writers” by commercial publishers, do they “write back” to their condition as sectional writers in the Malaysian literary canon. Instead, taking on a confessional mode, the two writers examine the paradox of their cosmopolitan sensibilities in an age of deterritorialized national literatures. Iyer reflects on her story collection Jungle Without Water, and her use of vernacular Malaysian English to transcend cultural explication, while Lee draws on his poetry collection Beds in the East to suggest how a double perspective that pivots between Malaysia and the UK can strategically mediate the colonial/postcolonial gaze.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• diaspora
• Malaysian literature
• postcolonialism
• deterritorialization
• global literary marketplace

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason Eng Hun Lee

Jason Eng Hun Lee is a creative writer and scholar whose research and practice fields encompass global anglophone literatures, postcolonial and diasporic writing, and global Shakespeares. His poetry collection Beds in the East (2019) was a finalist for the Melita Hume Prize. He serves as a literary editor for Postcolonial Text and is the current chief organizer of OutLoud HK, Hong Kong’s longest-running poetry collective. He is a lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Sreedhevi Iyer

Sreedhevi Iyer is the author of Jungle Without Water (2017) and The Tiniest House of Time (2020). Her research interests are interdisciplinary, including creative writing, postcolonial theory, discourse analysis, and cosmopolitanism. She is a lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne.