The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English

Patke, Rajeev S.; Holden, Philip

doi:10.4324/9780203874035

Cited by 29 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Although they had led Singapore to economic and political success in the global contestation, these ambitious policies have led the country to the crisis of cultural identity as the result of sacrificing its people for the neocolonial gods residing in the West and using its neighbors as the sources of manual labors. Furthermore, because of its complex (and arguably superficial) idea of multiracialism as well as its complex history of inequality, its figures on literary, social, and humanism (including Alfian bin Sa'at) have struggled to search for the idea of nationalism and cultural identities that could transcend the racial and religious boundaries (Patke & Holden, 2010;Tay, 2011). Sections that follow show how Alfian in "Birthday" reflects upon the historical narrative of the political economy of 1990s Singapore just discussed and how the narrative closes its eyes to the issues of inequality.…”

Section: S Singapore: History and Political Economymentioning

confidence: 99%

Issues of Inequality and the Political Economy in the 1990s Singapore: A Marxist Reading on Alfian bin Sa’at’s “Birthday”

Khadafi

2022

j.lang.lit.

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This research closely reads a short story by Alfian bin Sa’at entitled “Birthday” in relation to the historical narrative and the political economy of 1990s Singapore using the perspective of Terry Eagleton’s Marxist literary criticism. The result of this study shows 1) that Alfian challenges a portion of the historical narrative of Singapore’s political economy in the 1990s at which ideology works to justify the power hierarchy, yet altogether highlights the other portion of it to shed some light on the oppressed; 2) that challenging and, at the same time, highlighting the historical narrative are Alfian’s strategy to endorse his political commitment while not being openly partisan; and 3) that Alfian carefully configures the literary form and content of his work – through his use of multilingualism and Singaporean English – to advocate his idea of the future of Singapore and – through his use of simple sentences that build a stream-of-consciousness plot – to underline the complex social realities whereby issues of inequality (gender, racial, and class) are correlated. This study implies that the use of Marxist literary criticism in reading a literary work from a formerly colonized country cannot neglect the traces of neo- and/or colonial experiences since colonialism itself, following Marx and postcolonial theorists, is a more acute form of capitalism. However, this paper finds that, different from the usual postcolonial reading, the Singaporeans (its capitalists and government) are as complicit as the Western neo-colonial enterprises for the inequalities and oppression happening in the region.

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Section: S Singapore: History and Political Economymentioning

confidence: 99%

Issues of Inequality and the Political Economy in the 1990s Singapore: A Marxist Reading on Alfian bin Sa’at’s “Birthday”

Khadafi

2022

j.lang.lit.

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“…The Straits region of British Malaya developed a body of English-language writing during the early twentieth century but this did not, in the words of Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden, “consolidate into a recognizable local tradition” until the post-Second World War era (2010: 43). The dominant prose literary form to emerge from Singapore post-independence has been the pioneer narrative, which offers a semi-mythic history of the city state and its people (Patke and Holden, 2010: 158). While these narratives have been largely grounded in historical events, there has also been a more overtly speculative thread which has run throughout Singaporean literature.…”

Section: Science Fiction In Singapore: An Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 "The Travels of Chang Ching Chong", published serially in the Straits Chinese Magazine in 1898, is one such example. Patke and Holden (2010) compare the story to Gulliver's Travels (1726) in that it uses satire and describes a fictional migrant experience. Much of the action occurs in the land of "Ganiserop" (an anagram of Singapore) where women beat their husbands and men are sold as slaves.…”

Section: Asian Technology In "The Travels Of Chang Ching Chong" and T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Where there is life: Science fiction in Singapore

Smith

2019

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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This article seeks to situate certain works of Singaporean science fiction within their historical circumstances, demonstrating that Singaporean science fiction has historically served as social criticism, challenging both state narratives and foreign readings of the city state along the axis of East and West and “new” and “old”. The argument centres upon four texts: the anonymously-authored series “The Travels of Chang Ching Chong” (1989), Jahan Loh’s Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth (2013), and two texts by Sonny Liew, namely Malinky Robot (2011) and The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015). These texts, I believe, share certain thematic connections: each is interested in the relationship between new and old and foreign and familiar, and each seeks, in different ways, to counter dominant narratives of the time. Accordingly, this article is divided into two imbricated sections. The first examines science fiction responses to popular and state narratives of the West as a source of technological capital both under British rule and after independence. “The Travels of Chang Ching Chong” and the “Ah Huat’s Giant Robot” sections of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, I demonstrate, trouble this narrative, offering stories in which Asia provides a source of technological advancement. In the second section I explore popular depictions of hypermodernity in Singapore and the enduring myth of the destruction of “traditional” Asian cultures in the wake of the post-independence industrial turn. Both Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth and Malinky Robot, I argue, complicate this narrative, presenting both hypermodernity and “old Singapore” as fantasy.

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“…MLE is a tradition that started in the late 1940s free from its initial metropolitan bias and grew at a slow pace following the state's anti-colonial approach against the English language especially between the years of 1960s and 1980s. Many of the first and second generations of MLE writers were non-Malays of migrant ancestry who attended English-medium schools as a result of the education system in place during the colonial rule (Patke and Holden, 2010). This is an important point to consider, because, Palanisamy belongs to this early generation of school-goers who attended English-medium schools, thus enabling her to write in English.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which tongue? The Imported Colonial Standard or Motherland Vernacular? Exploring “Death” as the Birth of Postcolonial Malaysia in Muthammal Palanisamy’s Funeral Chant

Ganesan¹

2022

rupkatha

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This article examines “death” in a funeral chant set in the plantation estates of Malaysia, and written in English and Tamil, as a metaphor for the birth of the nation. It explores how the death of communal linguistic elements, both in orality and symbolic references, lead to the deconstruction of motherland identity markers which are then replaced by the reconstruction of diasporic identities that are observable through the use of standardized English. For this purpose, the Malaysian Indian life-writer, Muthammal Palanisamy’s English version of an oppari (Tamil for funeral chant), which was published in Malaysia (2002) will be read in relation to the Tamil version published in India (2007) through transliterated and translated texts of the chant. In so doing, the paper highlights the inherent gap between the two versions that can be usefully deployed to address whether English is an enabling tool through which ethnic Indians can express their identities in a postcolonial nation like Malaysia or is it perpetually contaminated by colonial history and values. On the other hand, the paper also draws attention to the question of whether the displacement of the vernacular language, i.e., Tamil, witnesses the inevitable cultural death of a diasporic community or does it display a form of inclusivity within the polyglot linguistic environment of the adopted land, Malaysia.

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The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

Issues of Inequality and the Political Economy in the 1990s Singapore: A Marxist Reading on Alfian bin Sa’at’s “Birthday”

Issues of Inequality and the Political Economy in the 1990s Singapore: A Marxist Reading on Alfian bin Sa’at’s “Birthday”

Where there is life: Science fiction in Singapore

Which tongue? The Imported Colonial Standard or Motherland Vernacular? Exploring “Death” as the Birth of Postcolonial Malaysia in Muthammal Palanisamy’s Funeral Chant

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