Mining the Archive: Historical Fiction, Counter-modernities, and Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth

Abstract

Historical fiction often serves to provide us with an opportunity to question the past as well as the identities that have crystallized around the archive. As an example of historical fiction, Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth depicts the emergence of anti-imperialist feeling, self-realization, and national consciousness in nineteenth-century Malaya, celebrating nationalist feeling as a commendable gesture beyond the self towards a larger sociality. The text invokes these sentiments to look for alternatives within a cultural and political space that continues to be strongly influenced by postcolonial state-sanctioned histories and masculinist versions of the past. Its attempt to loosen our received ways of knowing about history, modernity, Chineseness, and inter-racial relations is not an unqualified success, however. For in foregrounding gender and race as crucial components of modern subjectivity, A Bit of Earth ultimately shows itself to be more certain of its stand on women and its vision of modern Chinese identity than of its position vis-à-vis multiracial possibilities.

Popular fiction and white extremism: Neo‐Nazi ideology and medievalist crime fiction

“…Twenty-first century scholarship on historical fiction has often focussed especially on the genre's capacity to trouble established historical narratives and mythologies in a politically progressive way, such as through queer and postcolonial interventions (e.g. Harris, 2017;Poon, 2008). Medievalist historical fictions are not exclusively the domain of whiteness: Jonathan Hsy, for example, has recently shown that Asian American and Black medievalisms develop narratives that also counter white hegemonic claims over the past (Hsy, 2021).…”

Antipodean Victoriana: History and Fiction in Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water

“…Poon regards Suchen Christine Lim's A Bit of Earth (1997) as intervening in "official history" by highlighting an event that went almost unrecorded, "literally a footnote in history". 11 Given the recent interest in William Yate, Slow Water cannot be read in quite these terms: Yate is not a figure overlooked or forgotten by mainstream history. 12 Nonetheless, the ways in which Slow Water presents the story of Yate are indicative of the novel's engagement with history, highlighting a history of sexuality that intersects with a history of colonialism and settlement.…”