This paper traverses readings on Malay cultural identities. While previous research on Malay cultural identities has presented a broad overview, this paper attempts to frame this discussion based on elite constructions and socio-cultural worldviews of the Malay world. It proposes to be a start to exploring what is distinctive and worthwhile about Malay cultural identities.

This paper explores the ecoethical vision and ecological awareness in the selected poems of Pablo Neruda, a Nobel Prize winning poet of Latin American descent who was well known as a political poet. The structural and thematic analysis of the study will focus on the concept of 'Ethics' as one of the components of ecopoetry, which is the new brand of nature poetry and one of the components of ecocriticism which investigates the human-nature relationship. The objective of this paper is to highlight the significance of ecoethical consideration of Pablo Neruda towards wilderness. The study utilizes the theoretical frameworks of ecocriticism and ecopoetry to illuminate Neruda's call for reverence of the wilderness, flora and fauna, in the land, the sea and the sky through an ethical consideration of interdependence and interconnectedness of human and nonhuman. This paper problematizes Neruda's attitude towards nature to obtain new insights into his ethical stand towards the natural world. The discussion focuses on the poems which reflect the sense of ethics and represent the significant role of humility in shaping our sense of accountability towards the wilderness, while revealing Neruda's ideology and relationship with the non-human world.

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on three selected novels entitled Does My Head Look Big In This? (2005), Ten Things I Hate About Me (2006), and Where The Streets Had A Name (2008) written by Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979), a Palestinian-Egyptian Australian Muslim diasporic writer. In this article, we examine the manifestations of grafting eco-diasporic identity by Abdel-Fattah in order to address how identity graft is operated by interacting with ideology, culture and nature in the contexts of the host land and the homeland as represented in the three selected novels. Using Colin Richards' theory of graft as a framework, we explore identity contestations of Muslim young adults in the novels from an ecocritical and diasporic perspectives. In the novel Does My Head Look Big In This?, the images of Amal's sense of being marginalised in the semiosphere of the host land and the sense of self-respect of her Muslim rootedness and heritage of the homeland semiosphere frame the fractured graft of identity. The character of Jamilah, in Ten Things I Hate About Me displays genuine manifestations of the collective emblem of the grafted identity. Finally, the symbol of the iconic jar of the homeland soil and its potentiality of regenerating Hayaat's identity in Where the Streets Had A Name exhibits the ecological semiosphere in which the grafted identity is shaped. The current discussion, therefore, offers fresh insights into allowing a new horizon for identity grafting in Abdel-Fattah's works as well as other writers within the tradition of Muslim Diasporic Literature.

A critical mind is an empowering tool that allows the individual opportunity to participate in life as an active agent of change. In young adult learners, critical thinking is an evolving concept that requires careful consideration and the task of assisting this development rests among others in the hands of the education practitioners. What engages these groups of learners? What themes are of interest to them? What mode of learning interests them? The answers to these questions will be the enabling factor in engaging the mind and interests of these young adult. This study presents the findings of two case studies of young adult learners conducted at two institutions of higher learning in Selangor. Using both questionnaires and sample activities, the findings suggest that young adult learners generally are motivated to conduct critical thinking irrespective of the learning environment, albeit they require the appropriate stimulus including relevant choices of resources and methodology.