SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English

Transpacific Environmental Imagination

2024-02-09T13:04:24+08:00

This study delves into the representation of indigenous values in two literary works, the Healers and Burung Kayu, set in Hawaii and Mentawai, Indonesia, respectively. Drawing upon the framework of Critical Island Studies, it examines the complexities of island landscapes, societies, and histories through literature. The analysis focuses on the portrayal of kahuna and sikerei, custodians of indigenous knowledge in their respective communities, highlighting their roles and the historicity of repression and persecution. Both narratives affirm the interconnectedness of all entities based upon familial ties and creation myth of cosmology. The historicity of each narrative posits the unique circumstances, with Hawaii experiencing a resurgence of traditional beliefs post-Renaissance while Mentawai faced intensified persecution during the Indonesian New Order era. This study underscores the significance of indigeneity as a shared outlook among various ethnic communities worldwide, shaping their cultural identities and resilience. Based upon the analysis, comparative studies of indigeneity offer a promising avenue for further exploration, delineates the dynamics of island communities and their struggles to reclaim their heritage in contemporary society.

Decolonising the Map Through Literary Cartography in Select Malayalam Novels

2024-06-18T18:29:39+08:00

Using select indigenous novels translated from the Malayalam language, this paper will study how fictional spaces created by writers of Indian regional languages become a counter-narrative for colonial history and decolonise narrative and physical spaces. The paper will examine how postcolonial texts become ethnographic and social commentaries on colonial binaries and become resistance narratives to the hegemonic powers. Questions like how regional writers decolonise occidental maps, how the authors write alternative histories, how different versions of postcolonial communities are portrayed, how a postcolonial nation-state is built through literature, how communities that were left out in colonial discourses are brought back to the folds; how the history of a place influences power and identity of people; how Malayali writers locate an imagined space within actual geographic space through cartography; what determines the boundaries of these spaces- economically, culturally, historically, and politically, etc. will be addressed.

Literary Cartography of Performance Ecologies in Sheela Tomy’s "Valli"

2024-06-11T10:31:12+08:00

The present era, marked by the onset of posthumanism, is not just an antithesis to humanism but a return to a pre-humanism era where the aspects of the non-human and human existed. As a result, themes of blurring boundaries between humans and other species, climate catastrophes and ecological crises are predominantly narrativised, propelling us to look at the entanglements of human narratives, realities of geography, environment and history in studying sites of literature through the framework of performance ecologies provided by Jeff Grygny. Sheela Tomy’s Valli is one of the most recent in creating ecological awareness. In the picturesque setting of the idyllic village of Wayanad, Valli unfolds, seamlessly weaving together the essence of the locale. The traditional art forms, oral histories, dance, music, and divine invocations play a crucial role in evoking a profound sense of place. As we immerse ourselves in these cultural expressions, it becomes evident that they serve as powerful tools for analysing narrative as a spatially symbolic act, intricately mapping the memory and schema of the village. Inextricably linked to the earth, the novel foregrounds performance ecologies as a holistic interconnection of human and non-human spacetimes, thereby transforming into an intelligent discourse on spatial politics and environmental justice- a testimony to Pramod K Nayar’s description of Ecoprecarity. The paper argues that the competitive entanglement of performance ecology and spatial memory through the narrative at a literary representation level evokes a sense of ecoprecarity, which is crucial in recognition of either altering or expanding our notion of systems of sustainability.

Keywords: Ecology, Ecoprecarity, Indigenous Community, Performances, Spatiality

Feminist Temporality and the Negotiation of Gender Identity and Agency in Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister

2024-04-08T17:35:54+08:00

Using Steven Hitlin and Glen Elder’s theory of temporal agency and Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of feminist temporality, this article examines complex temporality and three female characters’ agency and negotiation with Confucian patriarchal gender norms in Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister (2021). Across different generations, three female characters—one millennial diasporic Malaysian Chinese girl, a local Malaysian Chinese ghost, and a Malaysian Chinese ghost/goddess—experience supernatural journeys to challenge Confucian patriarchal discourse. Diverse strategies of female agency concerning different temporal dimensions are reflected through the three female characters’ daily behaviours, resistance, and life choices. These behaviours and choices are shaped by their individual experiences and Confucian patriarchal gender norms at different times. By exercising female agency, three female characters immerse themselves deeply in the past or find a balance between memory and forgetting in order to heal the traumatic past or create a feminist future.

Female Body as a Site of Revenge

2024-06-03T00:46:21+08:00

Shashi Deshpande, an acclaimed Indian writer, is famous for tapping into the vocabularies and perceptions made available by the growth of the middle class in India. Throughout the years, Deshpande has emphasised the struggles of middle-class women at the intersection of Capitalism and patriarchy. Capitalist patriarchy represents ‘the dialectical relation between capitalist class structure and hierarchical sexual structure’ and can be considered the real cause of women’s oppression in contemporary times. (Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy 5). Deshpande’s “A Liberated Woman” establishes an innate relationship between an educated middle-class working woman’s “inner” life and social praxis. The text explores the protagonist’s struggle to gain autonomy within the institution of marriage and motherhood and further attempts to analyze how the so-called transgression of middle-class women into the public space disturbs the harmony of family life and supposed marital bliss. Even after being subject to sadism, Deshpande’s woman refuses to acknowledge the gravity and intricacies of the sexual assault as she tries to mystify the concrete bruises visible on her body. The present paper attempts to understand Deshpande’s unnamed protagonist’s predicament at the intersection of class and gender by drawing insights from the discourse concerning Capitalist patriarchy and the idea of intersectionality. It highlights how the plight of Deshpande’s woman can only be understood holistically when analyzed through an intersectional lens that considers her position vis-à-vis the economic, sociocultural, legal, and political domains in India. It further endeavors to disentangle how the female body of the unnamed protagonist of Deshpande’s oeuvre acts as a ‘site’ of control and domination by undertaking a close textual analysis of the text.

An Interview with Malaysian Writer Malachi Edwin Vethamani

2024-06-11T14:23:33+08:00

An interview with the award-winning author and academic, Malachi Edwin Vethamani. The Malaysian Publishers Association awarded his poetry anthology "Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems", the National Book Award 2020 in the English Language category, two of his other works, a collection of short stories, "Complicated Lives" and an edited anthology, "Malaysian Millennial Voices" were both nominated for the National Book Award 2022 in the English Language category. He has been rightly described as "the most prominent figure in Malaysian poetry was Malachi Edwin Vethamani, who is, without doubt, one of the leading English-language poets in Malaysia" by Professor Ismail S. Talib, in ‘The Journal of Commonwealth Literature’ (2023). I thoroughly enjoyed his latest collection of short stories “Have I got something to tell you” (2024), published by Penguin Random House, which is already making waves in Malaysia and the region.

The Postcolonial Millennium

2024-09-04T12:28:54+08:00

Review of The Postcolonial Millennium

Review of Edwin Malachi Vethamani’s Have I Got Something To Tell You (2024): A Celebration of Marginalised Identities

2024-06-10T18:56:48+08:00

Malachi Edwin Vethamani’s latest short story collection Have I Got Something to Tell You (2024) published by Penguin Books gives voice to the marginalised and insight into their internal worlds. As with his other collections, both short stories and poetry, Vethamani writes about complex human emotions. Consisting of a mix of old and new short stories, this collection explores a range of topics from gender and sexuality to race with a mix of wit and Vethamani’s characteristic minimalist writing style, peopled with memorable, intriguing, and well-written characters.

EDITORIAL

2024-12-27T22:40:21+08:00

EDITORIAL: Minorities Speak Up
This is not a special issue – and yet, entirely unplanned, we have a slate of articles which focus on minorities and how they resist authoritative impositions, whether in relation to ethnicity or gender or sexuality. Perhaps this reflects the zeitgeist. In a global landscape where minority rights and autonomy are increasingly under threat (think, for example, of the chilling slogan “Her body, my rights”), and where homeland and belonging are often precarious concepts at best (what does ‘home’ mean for Palestinians? Where is home for refugees and other displaced persons?), literature offers a space for acts of resistance. The fact that all five of the articles in this issue are concerned with acknowledging and centering this resistance in some form, speaks to the urgency and currency of these matters.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

2024-12-28T01:11:54+08:00

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS