The postcolonial millennium: New directions in Malaysian literature in English

This Special Issue casts a critical eye on new directions in Malaysian literature in English (MLE), exploring selected local and diasporic or transnational writings by established and new writers in the millennium, and how they can potentially help us rethink and resituate postcolonial studies on Malaysia. Studies on MLE have flourished since the publication 20 years ago of the seminal volume of critical essays Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader (Quayum and Wicks 2001), which helped lay the foundations of the field itself. Given Malaysia’s history as a former British colony, it is not surprising to find that MLE scholarship has been dominated by postcolonial approaches to the analysis of local literary life and journey, which are entwined with the country’s search for identity in the postcolonial, globalizing age. Since its humble beginnings in university productions of the late 1940s, MLE has been influenced and affected by the pivotal developments of decolonization, independence, nation-building, and globalization. History and the way it shapes the present have thus remained powerful concerns in the study of identity and literary expression in MLE, as it involves the pressing question of what it means to be “Malaysian” – not by any means an easy question to answer.

Malaysian society is ethnically diverse, comprising Malays and indigenous groups (69 percent), Chinese (22.5 percent), Indians (6.8 percent), and Eurasians and other groups (1 percent) (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2021). However, it is also deeply polarized along the lines of race and religion, the roots of which can be traced back to the British divide-and-rule policy, used to maintain colonial order by segregating the Malays as well as the Chinese and Indian migrant labourers who worked in the tin mines and rubber estates at the turn of the 20th century in British Malaya, today known as West or Peninsular Malaysia. Over the succeeding decades, limited inter-ethnic contact and the essentializing discourses and practices of race promoted by the British tended to reinforce racial barriers and cultural insularity among the groups. Despite the formation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963¹ and the achievement of independence from the British, inter-ethnic hostilities and tensions continued to escalate until the tragic day of May 13, 1969, when race riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur. “May 13” was a watershed event that led to the radical reshaping of Malaysia’s sociopolitical landscape, when the government moved to safeguard the position and special rights of “native” Malays – also defined as Muslims in the Constitution – by instituting key policies that inevitably affected the status of English-language and anglophone writing: the 1967 National Language Bill, which mandated Malay or Bahasa Melayu (renamed Bahasa Malaysia) as the national language, in place of English, and the 1971 National Culture Policy, which conferred “national” status upon only “indigenous” cultural productions, including Malay literature. In line with these policies, English was downgraded to become the nation’s second language, while anglophone writing, redefined as “sectional” or “foreign”² literature, languished for much of the 1970s and 1980s.

The rise of Malay ethnocentrism in the 1970s also had heavy consequences for non-Malay anglophone writers, who experienced a double marginalization in terms of race and language. The majority of the pioneering and second-generation writers in MLE were non-Malays, and include the canonical names Lloyd Fernando (1926–2008), Lee Kok Liang (1927–92), Ee Tiang Hong (1933–90), Wong Phui Nam (b. 1935), Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof (b. 1939),³ Cecil Rajendra (b. 1941), K.S. Maniam (1942–2020), Shirley Geok-lin Lim (b. 1944), and Kee Thuan Chye (b. 1954). Disillusioned, and rejecting the state politics of race and language, Ee and Lim left Malaysia. Meanwhile, the writers who remained were, like all Malaysians, subjected to stringent censorship laws that prohibited statements about the privileged status of Malays as Bumiputera (“sons of the soil”). Such prohibitions extended to the discussion of Bahasa Malaysia, the monarchy, and Islam. Until today, the politics and practices of polarization, hierarchization, and exclusion have continued to thrive under the Malay-centric government, as a result of which the racial and religious chasm between Malays and non-Malays has only widened.

In the 1990s, however, Malaysia began to transform under the auspices of late-capitalism and globalization, and the value of English as the international language of technology, finance, and commerce was increasingly recognized by the government. While still enforcing Malay/Bumiputera-first policies, the government also strengthened the use of English at the national level by, among other moves, incorporating local anglophone literature in the English curriculum for secondary schools (Chin 2007, 268). The revival of English in Malaysia had positive consequences for the local writing scene, which saw the emergence of a “new generation” of writers (Chin 2007, 260) like Chuah Guat Eng (b. 1943; Malaysia’s first female novelist in English), Marie Gerrina Louis (b. 1964), Charlene Rajendran (b. 1964), and Bernice Chauly (b. 1968). Of note, too, is the increased number of anglophone Malay writers such as Rehman Rashid (1955–2017), Che Husna Azhari (b. 1955), Karim Raslan (b. 1963), Farish A. Noor (b. 1967), and Dina Zaman (b. 1969); they represent the New Malays (Melayu Baru) who had “benefitted from the pro-Malay economic and cultural reforms of the 1970s and 1980s” (Chin 2007, 277). In the past, only a few Malay writers produced works in English, the most famous of whom are the poets Salleh Ben Joned (1941–2020) and Muhammad Haji Salleh (b. 1942).

Building on the creative momentum of the 1990s, MLE has enjoyed a relatively stable period of growth this century. The award-winning poet and author Shirley Geok-lin Lim published her only two novels Joss and Gold (2001) and Sister Swing (2006) in the first decade, as well as several volumes of poetry, while local writers K.S. Maniam, Chuah Guat Eng, and Bernice Chauly each published one or more novels. Though scarce, anthologies of poetry were also produced by established poets like Salleh Ben Joned, Cecil Rajendra, Wong Phui Nam, and Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof. Publications in drama have been more rare, although the theatre scene in Malaysia has remained active. Exceptions are the published plays of Jit Murad (b. 1960), Ann Lee (b. 1965), Huzir Sulaiman (b. 1973), and Kee Thuan Chye. Then there are the new writers of the millennium, whose fresh or different voices, viewpoints, ideas, and styles have also shaped new trends and directions.

Without doubt, the development with the greatest impact over the last two decades has been the arrival of “global” award-winning Malaysian writers, including first-time authors Rani Manicka (b. 1964), Tash Aw (b. 1971), Tan Twan Eng (b. 1972), and Preeta Samarasan (b. 1976). The most prominent names here are Aw and Tan, whose respective first novels The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) and The Gift of Rain (2007) were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; notably, Tan’s second novel Garden of Evening Mists (2012) was not only shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, but also adapted into a film in 2019. The literary scene has also been enriched by the works of other diasporic or transnational writers such as Chan Ling Yap (b. 1947), Tei Chiew-Siah (or Suria Tei) (b. 1963), whose first novel Little Hut of Leaping Fishes (2008) was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, Felicia Yap (b. 1980), Sreedhevi Iyer (b. 1977), and, more recently, Zen Cho (b. 1986), whose works have won awards in the fantasy genre. The writers mentioned thus far produce prose fiction, especially novels, but a very small group is focused on poetry, including Omar Musa (b. 1984) and Jason Eng Hun Lee (b. 1984). The global stature and significance of these writers, especially Aw and Tan, has also heightened Malaysia’s presence on the world literary map.

That the majority of Malaysia’s more famous anglophone authors are non-Malays residing abroad nevertheless speaks to the prevailing issues of race, place, and identity, not to mention the far-reaching effects of the country’s neocolonial forms of divide and rule. It should be noted too that a few Malay writers, including Huzir Sulaiman and Farish A. Noor, have left Malaysia to make Singapore their home. The motivations compelling the migration of millennial diasporic writers may, however, be more varied, especially within the context of the globalized and decentred reality where multiple homes/centres and identities have become the norm while transconnections and mobility are increasingly valued. Regardless of the reasons, many of the diasporic authors – both past and present – still draw on Malaysia in their imagining and articulations of home, revealing in the process the intricate ties of attachment and belonging, in addition to the complexities of identity in the globalized era.

Within the glocalizing contexts of Malaysia, the literary terrain has witnessed similar positive movements in anglophone writing, many of which can be attributed to the efforts of local writers and publishers. Since the 1990s, local publishers have played a crucial role in creating a viable space for literary expression, especially for new voices in English. Silverfish Books has been particularly active, publishing the first novels of, among others, Rozlan Mohd Noor (b. 1953), Shih-li Kow (b. 1968), and Iskandar al-Bakri (b. 1974). Pelanduk Publications has produced the novels of Khoo Kheng-Hor (b. 1956) while Gerakbudaya has introduced its share of new writers such as Wong Ming Yook (b. 1960). In 2011, Malaysia’s literary scene received a further boost with the launch of the George Town Literary Festival (GTLF). Held annually at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site of George Town, Penang, the festival has attracted the attention of writers, literary aficionados, and artists from around the world. While spotlighting Malaysia’s local and global luminaries like Muhammad Haji Salleh and Tan Twan Eng, GTLF has also promoted rising local talents like Shih-li Kow, Dina Zaman, and Iskandar al-Bakri.

Interestingly, literary output in the millennium has been dominated by prose fiction, with the global or transnational Malaysian novel by the aforementioned diasporic authors taking centre stage. Local publishers have also fostered new ideas, themes, genres, and styles among Malaysian writers. From 2001 to 2006, Silverfish Books contributed to the growth of contemporary short fiction by launching the Silverfish New Writing series. Another influential publisher is Buku Fixi, whose English-language imprint Fixi Novo helped expand the short story writing scene by tapping into the popular trends of pulp and speculative fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural, noir, and crime. Queer writing, too, made its debut in Malaysia in the form of short fiction. Anthologized in Body 2 Body: A Malaysian Queer Anthology (2009) and Mata Hati Kita/The Eyes of Our Hearts (2016), these locally published stories of queer lives and experiences are all the more significant given the criminalization of homosexuality and the attendant stigmatization of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) by religious communities and conservative sectors of society.

The global recognition of local Malaysian talent is another important development. In 2011, Rozlan Mohd Noor’s first novel 21 Immortals: Inspector Mislan and the Yee Sang Murders (2010) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Saraswathy M. Manickam’s “My Mother Pattu” won the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asian region). More recently, Sharmini Aphrodite’s “Ouroboros, Ouroboros” and Ling Low’s “Weeds” were shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2020 and 2021 respectively. In 2019 too, Hanna Alkaf (b. 1985) made waves with her first novel The Weight of Our Sky, which won the Freeman Book Award in the Young Adult category, while her second novel The Girl and the Ghost (2020), aimed at young readers, was a Kirkus Prize 2020 finalist. Equally worth mentioning is the fact that certain international publishers have taken an interest in relatively unknown local authors. A good example of this development is Paul Gnanaselvam (b. 1975), whose The Elephant Trophy and Other Stories was published by Penguin in 2021. Monsoon Books has also published the works of new writers, including Golda Mowe’s Iban Dream trilogy (2012–18). A Sarawakian, Mowe (b. 1970) represents one of the few new East Malaysian voices in a space largely overshadowed by West Malaysian writers.

Despite these promising achievements, writers in Malaysia undoubtedly face more challenges than most of their global counterparts. The overall limited output and sporadic publications that include one-off works attest to the difficulties experienced on the ground, which include the entrenched culture of (self-)censorship, insufficient publishing opportunities, and limited readership. This last concern can be attributed to linguistic divisions among Malaysian readers, the biased perception of local writings as “inferior” compared to internationally published works, and generally underdeveloped reading habits (Malaysians read an average of two books per year) due to varying influences, including the Internet, social media, video games, TV, and other forms of entertainment as well as the lack of motivation and peer pressure (Supramani 2021). Then there is the lack of state support for local English-language writing. With little funding, sponsorship, awards, or even infrastructure to encourage literary activities, budding local writers whose works have received scant recognition seldom last long or are soon forgotten. Consequently, new local writers have remained relatively little known outside Malaysia. This situation is reflected in MLE scholarship, where a considerable corpus of studies on famous transnational writers like Aw, Tan, and Samarasan can be found, alongside the studies of major or canonical writers; however, locally published and budding authors are seldom examined, as a result of the above-mentioned factors. While the growth of MLE in the millennium has been positively influenced by global cultural flows, the constraints faced by local writers also highlight the diverse ways in which they are affected by state ethnocentrism, and the attendant institutionalized barriers of race and language. Still, the developments discussed here underscore a growing local literary scene in the millennium, which is “nothing short of remarkable” and should “serve as an inspiring story of cultural tenacity” (Ng 2018, 6).

Given this steady growth of MLE, especially in the new millennium, in the face of many challenges from the state-authored policies in Malaysia, this Special Issue was designed to highlight contemporary trends in the tradition, three of which can be identified as follows: (a) Malaysian anglophone literature has diversified into new genres such as fantasy fiction, science fiction, and webcomic; (b) it is flourishing more in diaspora, or among its transnational members, than at home; and (c) transnational writers tend to receive more critical attention than locally based ones.

It is therefore no surprise that six of the nine articles in the issue deal with transnational or globally oriented writers, or writers who continue to write about Malaysia with an eye on the world outside, or the countries they have travelled to, sojourned in, or adopted as their new homeland. This list includes Tash Aw, Preeta Samarasan, Zen Cho, Omar Musa, Jason Eng Hun Lee, and Sreedhevi Iyer. All six now live outside Malaysia and write with a “double perspective” and deterritorialized consciousness. Because of the number of articles in this Special Issue devoted to these writers, we table them first, followed by the articles on local writers. Moreover, the first group is sequenced both chronologically and according to genre: the first three are on canonical prose and fiction; the fourth is on fantasy fiction; the fifth on poetry; while the final one is a reflective essay by two younger writers living in Hong Kong and Australia. The three articles on “local” writers are also arranged chronologically: the first examines two novels by earlier writers, the second a body of Malaysian cyberpunk short stories, and the last is an ongoing webcomic that caricatures Malaysia’s handling of the current pandemic.

The issue opens with two articles on the works of Taipei-born Malaysian Chinese writer Tash Aw. The first, “China, Malaysia, and Millennial Diasporic Identity in Tash Aw’s The Face and Five Star Billionaire” by Singapore scholar Walter S.H. Lim, focuses on Aw’s third novel (from 2013) and his 2016 non-fiction essay to explore the author’s representation of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and how China’s rise as a major economic and political power in the 21st century has transformed what was once a land of lack into one of new promise and opportunity for its migrant communities. Lim first investigates Aw’s thematization of the cultural politics of Chinese identity in Malaysia in The Face, where the educated Chinese are no longer constrained by the demands and imperatives of the nation state but operate as cosmopolitans and world-travellers, enjoying the exhilaration of transnational mobility. Lim argues that, as a 21st-century writer, Aw has a different sociocultural and political frame of reference available as a result of the rise of China, compared to the material available to 20th-century Malaysian Chinese writers such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim. The discussion then pivots on Five Star Billionaire and the promise offered by millennial China, where several Malaysian Chinese subjects have gathered to pursue their dreams and ambitions, contrary to the familiar motif of east–west immigrant desire traditionally found in Southeast and Asian American literature. However, Lim suggests that Aw’s portrayal of China in the novel is ambiguous; while he sees it as a land of new hope and excitement, it is also one of distrust, indifference, and horrific exploitation. While a land of abundance, it is also a dog-eat-dog world.

Angelia Poon’s “Universalism and the Malaysian Anglophone Novel: Exploring Inequality, Migrancy, and Class in Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors” focuses on Aw’s fourth novel, published in 2019. The article explores the motifs of inequality, migrancy, and class in a work that, Poon argues, is located in a pivotal space between national specificity and general universalism. She sees it as appropriating Darwinian ideas about survival, evolution, chance, environment, and competition to provide a critique of both Malaysian ethnic and class politics and global capitalism, as the two are interconnected, and the former operates within the orbit of the latter.

In “Transnational Re-memorialization in Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day”, Ann Ang explicates Preeta Samarasan’s debut novel from 2008, written purposely as a “more female” version of Salman’s Rushdie’s seminal work as a “Midnight’s Children for Malaysia”. Ang argues that the novel re-memorializes the marginalized history of the Malaysian Indians, especially following the violent riots of May 13, which entrenched the country’s already racially hierarchic policies. However, Samarasan situates her narrative, first, from a Malaysian Indian perspective and, secondly, from a transnational locus, since, like Aw, she is a transnationally mobile writer. While the novel offers a critique of Malaysia’s oppressive race politics, it also exposes the class, gender, and caste injustices inherent in the Malaysian Indian community.

With “Interracial Relations and the Post-Postcolonial Future in Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad” by Malaysian scholar Grace V.S. Chin, we move from Malaysian canonical fiction to supernatural and fantasy fiction, as Chin investigates three stories from Spirits Abroad (2014) by Zen Cho, a Malaysian writer currently residing in the UK. Chin contends that although Cho breaks away from the “highbrow” literary aesthetics of earlier Malaysian authors by writing in a popular speculative genre, her work has significance within the tradition of resistance and inclusivity established by the older generation of writers. Chin maintains that Cho’s fiction defies the ethnocentric boundaries of Malaysian politics and thus creates the possibility of a new Malaysia, or a post-postcolonial Malaysia, that is made up of interstitial spaces and hybridized identities, and where her human and supernatural characters mingle and interact without the traditional communal restrictions. This revisionary narrative makes Cho a progressive and futuristic writer who deconstructs the Malaysian race binary with a dialogic vision in which self and other are reconceived as different yet equal.

“Hyphenational Poetics in Omar Musa’s Parang and Millefiori” focuses on the spoken-word poetry of Omar Musa, an Australian-born Malaysian poet of hybrid identity, who shares a complex mix of Malay, Kedayan, and Suluk heritage on his father’s side and an Irish background on his mother’s. US-based scholar Weihsin Gui probes two volumes of Omar’s⁴ poetry, Parang (2014) and Millefiori (2017), to bring home the argument that as a “doubly diasporic” and (multi-)hyphenated poet with a global consciousness, Musa recurrently uses the hyphen both as a bridge and a parang (machete). His poetry critiques both Malaysia and Australia while creating connections between the two countries, as well as the multiple cultural elements in his life. “As parang”, Gui argues, “the poem[s] offer incisive comments on national histories and political hypocrisies that have devastated and disenfranchised various groups of people around the world; as hyphen [they] bridge Omar’s personal background and wider political consciousness [with] shared legacies of suffering.” This complex texture of his imagination, expressed through a combination of English and Malay, induces Omar to write what Gui describes as “hyphenational poetics”.

In “On Not Writing Back: Cosmopolitan Paradoxes in New Diasporic Malaysian Writing Today”, two emerging Malaysian transnational writers, Jason Lee and Sreedhevi Iyer, who left the country several years ago and have only peripheral contacts with the homeland, reflect on how they see themselves as postcolonial writers, how they relate to the present state of Malaysian culture and politics, and perceive their identity in their deterritorialized state. They also deliberate on their choice of craft, and the scope and function of their creativity. They argue that, unlike the previous generation of Malaysian post-independence anglophone writers, they are not interested in “writing back” either to the former colonial centre or to their condition as “sectional” writers in the Malaysian literary tradition. Iyer reflects on her short story collection Jungle Without Water (2017) and explains how she uses “Manglish”, or the Malaysian variety of English, as a specific craft choice to transcend cultural explication and subvert the responses of the global/glocal English language reader. Lee, by contrast, draws on his poetry collection Beds in the East (2019) to suggest how a double perspective on Malaysia and the UK can strategically mediate the colonial/postcolonial gaze. In contrast to Iyer’s resistance vernacular, Lee frames a dialogical interaction between a variety of local and cosmopolitan readerships, playing on their reflexive assumptions on the poet’s identity as “other”.

With “The Ruins of Referentiality: Allegorical Realism and Traumatic Fragments in Scorpion Orchid and The Search” we transition from the transnational writers to local writers or writers who wrote/write about Malaysia from home soil. There are three articles in this category: Augustine Chay’s comparative essay on Lloyd Fernando’s 1976 novel and T.J. Anthony’s The Search, published in 1978; Netty Mattar’s article on Malaysian cyberpunk short stories; and Susan Philip’s appraisal of Ernest Ng’s evolving webcomic based on Malaysia’s response to the current global pandemic.

In his article, Augustine Chay explores the allegorical realism of Scorpion Orchid with its lesser-known contemporary The Search by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory. Chay argues that the two novels deal with Malaysian politics in the post-independence formative years and, in particular, the “nationalized cultural trauma” created by the pivotal interracial riots of May 13 which have come to define Malaysia’s present identity as a nation. However, while The Search provides a literary archive of post-1969 memories that helps to illuminate the often forgotten contingencies of the aftermath, Scorpion Orchid recontextualizes the traumatic events of 1969 through a narrative of the volatile political circumstances in Singapore in the 1950s.

In “Diffractive Spaces: An Analysis of Malaysian Cyberpunk”, Netty Mattar investigates a group of three cyberpunk short stories from Cyberpunk: Malaysia (2015), the country’s first anthology of this subgenre of science fiction, edited by Zen Cho, whose own fantasy short fiction from Spirits Abroad (2014) is the subject of Grace V.S. Chin’s article. The stories studied are all set in a dystopian future Malaysia reduced to an urban wasteland by the intrusions of global informational capitalism. Netty first illustrates the effect of colonialism and colonial reordering of space on Malaysian society and discusses the limits of postcolonial theory, with its ideas that addresses these issues – particularly those related to racial difference and contestation – through a process of negotiation, imitation, and assimilation. The article’s argument then proposes a better way to read Malaysian literature, especially its cyberpunk stories, by adopting the concept of “diffraction” that allows readers to go beyond the western binary system of thought and perceive non-dualistic patterns of difference. Diffraction allows us to be more attentive to how different cultural entities and ontologies impede, pass through, or interfere with one another, while observing how differences are upheld and strengthened. Netty applies this concept to her reading of the three stories and demonstrates how they offer an alternative spatial imaginary of Malaysia’s identity outside western binary frames of understanding.

In the final article, “Satire and Community in the Time of COVID: An Analysis of Ernest Ng’s Covidball Z”, Susan Philip provides a critique of Ernest Ng’s evolving satirical webcomic that deals with the sloppy response of Malaysia and its political leadership to the COVID-19 pandemic. She explains how this webcomic, shared online via Facebook, lampoons the country’s top leadership with carefully researched graphics and funny but caustic narratives, and has created a strong community of readers united in their ridicule of themselves and their political leaders. Ng’s webcomic is popular first, because there is no outside control on its production, as in editorial cartoons in the mainstream media; second, although satirical, Ng is strategic and measured in his criticisms of influential establishment figures, so that he does not violate the censorship laws. In other words, unlike the political cartoonist Zunar or graphic designer and street artist Fahmi Reza, Ng does not push too far his dissent against the government and ruling elites. Instead, he adopts a gentler and less biting approach, and deliberately avoids exposing himself or his audience to the threats from Malaysia’s Communication and Multimedia Act and the Sedition Act.

The Special Issue concludes with a selection of poems by Malaysian writers Muhammad Haji Salleh, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Omar Musa, and Jason Lee.

All in all, the articles demonstrate how much the Malaysian English-language writers of the new millennium have accomplished and how much the anglophone literary tradition has advanced, notwithstanding the many challenges writers face in relation to their ethnicity and creative medium. It is evident that because of the government’s increasingly Malay-centric policies, the centre of Malaysian anglophone literature is gradually moving outside the country’s borders. More writers are becoming mobile and transnational and writing about Malaysia as their imaginary homeland from their adopted destinations. The writers at home, who are subjected to daily marginalization, are also finding new modes of expression; and because of the combined effort of the local and transnational writers MLE is making strides and diversifying into new genres, increasingly making a mark on the global stage and bringing literary accolades to a country that, paradoxically, views them as a threat to its parochial vision of national identity, and often relegates them to the category of “sectional” and “foreign” writers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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).

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.