No abstract

The concept of diaspora enjoys a significant currency in contemporary cultural theory. Its descriptive paradigm associates it with the shared experience of displacement, a sense of common origins, and a material or symbolic attachment to the 'original' homeland. This traditional framework overlooks diaspora as a narrative of national desire that enables contestation and disruption of dominant hierarchies and ideologies of nation from within the territorial, political, and cultural boundaries of the nation. It is this neglected aspect of diaspora as a narrative of national identification that is addressed in this paper, which examines the significance of contemporary diaspora cultural politics and formations vis-à-vis the exclusionary hegemonies and workings of the nation-state. In this sense, it seeks to re-orientate diaspora as a conceptual process that brings to the fore the 'routed' dimensions in the national affiliations and longings of marginalized minority communities. Focusing on the postcolonial nation-state of Malaysia and its literary productions, the paper's point of anchorage and discussion, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, is 'where you're born', rather than 'where you're from'. This shift from a descriptive to a processual approach to diaspora enables more inclusive and emancipatory ways of reading both diaspora and homeland.

New transitions -and tensions -in Malaysian society have created a much-needed space for critical reflection on the meaning of race. They have also provided the impetus to rethink the dominant paradigm shaping Malaysian studies. This article begins this discussion by situating race within three frameworks that give it meaning -state, academic and people-centred discourse from the nation's cultural margins. These discourses are then viewed in terms of conjunctures or temporal formations. The statedriven paradigm of pluralism, as manifested in the separate and separable 'Malay'/ 'Chinese'/'Indian'/ 'Others' (MCIO) racial categorizations, has its origins in British colonialism. It is deeply embedded in policies and practices and also integrated into formal structures and institutions. Although these categories of race and naming have begun to lose much of their salience on the ground, they continue to be mobilized by the state and other hegemonic non-state actors as a primary marker of difference and differentiation between groups. Equally disconcerting is the fact that even academic discourse is also largely conducted within the epistemological and ontological bases of colonialist knowledge production. Since state and other non-state actors who benefit from dominant paradigms have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining them, and tend to resist reform, this article argues that it is imperative that the attempt to think critically about race is done at, from, and through the site of conceptual disjuncture between 'how we are represented' and 'how we might represent ourselves'. This rupture must be seen as a seminal point of departure for knowledge construction. The article concludes with a consideration of the role of the researcher in its critical trajectory to track 'where we are, how we got here and where we can go from here'. Ethnicities 0(0) 1-28 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Much of early critical attention on cultural globalization has centred around the emphasis on homogenization. In recent decades, however, postcolonial scholars have tended to focus on the idea of heterogenization, suggesting that this has perhaps been the major outcome of cultural globalization. For them, globalization has opened a space for the periphery to have a voice, with the authority of the centre subject to question from the margins. Offering an examination of Malaysian literature in English and drawing its main theoretical insights from postcolonial studies, this article argues that the Malaysian nation-state’s embrace of globalization, and of English as a prime agent in the globalizing process, has given rise to a context where it is creative writing in the former colonial language that has become the very medium that offers resistance to forms of cultural hegemony embedded in state-sanctioned conceptions of national identity.

Due to the analytical power and purchase of its inclusivist ideal, cosmopolitanism has been the subject of renewed interest in academic debates and discussions of the past three decades. As a 'way of being in the world' (Waldron, 2000: 227), cosmopolitanism is broadly defined as a willingness to engage with the Other. It entails 'an intellectual and aesthetic openness towards divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity' (Hannerz, 1990: 239). The view of cosmopolitanism as a political ideal, however, derives from the Kantian philosophical tradition, itself a much debated and highly complex configuration of ideas, and is aimed at the creation of 'a higher order space, not marked by a world government, but by a world federation of republican states in which citizens from particular countries would all come together in a "condition of lawful association with one another"' (Benhabib, 2004: 39). As a political project that aims at 'a higher order space' and also as a cultural principle that is built on an awareness of otherness, cosmopolitanism has emerged from its genesis in the time of the ancient Greeks through nineteenth-century thought to the present as a way of understanding social phenomena that transcend the boundedness of statist and nationalist formations.Since the 1990s, cosmopolitanism's universalist theoretical foundations have in particular been the subject of extended critique. In this regard, Kant's Enlightenment conception of cosmopolitanism, still a major reference point in modern philosophical thinking on the subject, has been questioned and reframed in the light of the evolving nature of political and economic structures as well as that of social and cultural contexts around the globe. The new and particular circumstances for (re) articulating cosmopolitanism is reflected in the number of revisionary formulations that exist in disciplines as varied as philosophy,