Showing papers in "An International Journal of Asian Literatures, Cultures and Englishes in 2013"

Commemorating Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and contextualising her work in South Asian Muslim feminism

Abstract: Colonial Muslim South Asia had two leading cultural centres: Bengal and North India. As part of the far-reaching reformist movement during the colonial period and beyond, intellectual work from these two places included a powerful segment of feminist writing which has remained the harbinger of the women’s rights movement among Muslims of this region. It is important to give research attention to South Asian Muslim writers, many of whom have been marginalised mainly because of the dominance of, and sometimes overriding and disproportionate focus on, their Hindu counterparts. Against this background, this article discusses the life, incredible commitment, sacrifice and feminist accomplishments of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). It will also contextualise her ideas in the broader South Asian Muslim feminist tradition.

Reading Emerson and Tagore in the Age of Religious Intolerance

Abstract: The greatest problems of the world result from people of different cultures, races and religions being unable to get along and to work together to solve problems such as racism, religious extremism, terrorism and ethnic conflicts. These problems have implicated our contemporary time, especially the post-9/11 era, with anxiety, fear, and suspicion. In this crucial phase of human history, we need what Martha Nussbaum calls an “imaginative capacity” to see how the world looks from the point of view of a person who has a different religion. In this article, I discuss the religious thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Although they lived in different cultures and belonged to different literary periods, their intellectual correspondence shows how both of them transcended contemporary religious traditions and established an original relationship with the Supreme Being. It is my hope that this comparative analysis, thus far unexplored, will provide us with insights into understanding religion with an “imaginative capacity” at a time when religious intolerance is disrupting peace across the globe.

Can a Spirit of Our Own be Expressed in the Language of Our Coloniser

Abstract: This study explores the relationship between the concept of Indian identity and the English language as reflected in Indian literature. Questions of identity in this literature are inextricably connected with the issue of using English, the language of the erstwhile colonisers, to portray the non-English, multilingual socio-cultural and political experience of the Indian space. I argue that English is today an Indian language and even functions as a vernacular Indian language. An attempt to dismiss English as the language of the coloniser is endeavouring to reverse the wheels of history, because the Indian nation itself is a product of colonialism. Literature written in this language is not antithetical to or removed in its concerns from literature written in the different regional Indian languages. Rather, like literature in any other Indian language, not only is Indian-English literature credible Indian literature, but often it expresses a sensibility associated with the vernacular and can be meant primarily for an Indian audience. The vernacularisation of English is not based on any linguistic peculiarities of Indian English, but is achieved through the socio-political aspects of the language and the literary articulations of English in a mutually constitutive manner alongside various Indian regional languages.

When Abused Women Get Away with Murder: Law, Justice and Truth in three English-language Malaysian Novels by Women

Abstract: Although the socially oppressed woman is almost a standard feature in Malaysian English-language fictional narratives, abused-women-turned-murderers are found only in novels by women. Between 1994 and 2000, three women published novels featuring women who kill and confess their crimes but, notably, are not brought to justice. To date, these are the only Malaysian examples of this sub-genre of the crime novel. This paper examines the moral universes depicted in the three novels, and identifies culturally and institutionally determined concepts and perceptions of law, justice and truth that might explain why the women who kill are allowed to go unpunished.

Edwin Thumboo’s “Difference”: Some Dilemmas of Post-colonial Creativity

Abstract: Despite Edwin Thumboo’s iconic status within the modern Singaporean artistic scene, observation of the highly vibrant creative and critical activity that has gone on/is still going on on that scene suggests, somewhat ironically, that he and his fellow artistes have throughout been proceeding, unrecognised, along significantly divergent paths. The paper argues that what Thumboo has to offer his fellow artistes/critics will remind them of things they cannot afford to forget, as they seem to have, if their work is to address what might be considered the main challenge of post-colonial creativity, namely, that of fashioning, out of their own available (modern and traditional) resources a distinct contemporary Singaporean creative voice, the voice through which they will be able to liberate themselves and their people from the epistemological, cultural and other forms of hegemony under which, through its interpellations, the dominant empire/capitalism constructed hierarchised global order is seeking to draw them. The paper supports its argument by appending an earlier unpublished paper by the author that supplies a theorised examination of activity in the Singapore theatre during the headiest days of its coming alive that predicts to its present state.

Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World : Story of the Failure of the Nationalist Project

Abstract: As an intense literary text, The Home and the World could be read in more than one way, and through different interpretations. This paper attempts to compare the novel with early twentieth century Vietnamese novels. The Home and the World is a novel that reads like an allegory on the failure of the Indian nationalist projects, 3 circling around the issues of "Home" versus "World," tradition versus modernity, created by the a ctive involvement of the colonisers in the cultural, economic and administrative life of the colonised. It could be read as an allegory on the failure of Indian nationalism to accept tradition and modernity, home and the world, concurrently. In addition, the novel offers an alternative nationalist project that could free India from its obsession with the colonising powers: true freedom of the nationalist imagination will be gained by going beyond every form of ideological prejudice and separation, and by synthesising every conceivable value that could be useful for the development and maintenance of the nation. And as a concrete example of his alternative nationalist project, Tagore founded Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan in 1921.

“This Image of Themselves”: (Re)Discovering the Merlion’s Liminality

Abstract: The publication by Singaporean small press Firstfruits Publications of Reflecting on the Merlion in 2009 marked a consolidation of the canon of Merlion poetry in Singapore. Apart from inspiring the work gathered in this anthology, Edwin Thumboo’s “Ulysses by the Merlion” has also attracted both praise and criticism for its engagement with the Merlion. This essay seeks to establish a reading of Thumboo’s poem using the concept of liminality, one that has previously been given little attention in the critical literature on the poem, despite being embedded in the text itself. It also argues that by ignoring this concept, the Merlion poems by Lee Tzu Pheng and Alfian Sa’at that followed after Thumboo’s have had the unfortunate effect of forcing the discourse surrounding the Merlion into a dead end.

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the Debate over Gender Relations among Muslim Intellectuals in Late Colonial Bengal

Abstract: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was undoubtedly a remarkable intellectual and social reformer of her time, and in recent decades, her work has rightfully found its place among writings by “exceptional,” “early feminist” women from colonial India. This paper is an attempt to situate Rokeya’s contribution as a writer and reformer within the larger context of debates over the “woman question” as it unfolded in discussions of Muslim intellectuals in late colonial Bengal. It proceeds from the premise that without such contextualisation, Rokeya and her work is too often cast as “out of” or “ahead of” her time, when in fact Muslim intellectuals – a number of women among them – were engaged in vibrant debates over a range of social and political issues in the first half of the twentieth century that has been marginalised within normative histories of that time.

The Célestin Prophecy: Ha Jin’s “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch , and the Limits of Exoticism

Abstract: Increasingly, postcolonial scholars are recognising that the discipline must move beyond the mere critique of European imperialism, and that the future lies, in part, in seeking solutions to the conflicts and injustices that remain the persistent legacy of the colonial era. A concurrent trend in literature departments has been the push to incorporate and encourage comparative methodologies. This essay brings into conversation two works of Asian American fiction that address the problematics of transnational encounter in the age of globalisation. In both Ha Jin’s “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town” and Lawrence Chua’s Gold by the Inch the authors explore familiar postcolonial themes: Western economic and cultural hegemony, cultural imperialism, the legacy of the Euro-American colonial era – yet they do so from a very particular (and increasingly common) perspective that as yet has not been sufficiently addressed by postcolonial scholars. Reading these texts through the lens of Roger Celestin’s theorisation of the limits of traditional literary exoticism in From Cannibals to Radicals, this essay calls for a re-evaluation, not merely of our understanding of literary exoticism, nor merely of our understanding of the transpacific as a political imaginary, but also of our long-held conceptions of national literature and comparative scholarship.

Notes on Why Friends, Why Friendship into Poems

Abstract: History is especially important in a nation that does not have a long past. For the writer who has to work in cross-cultural terms, the study of English Literature would have stressed the importance of a working history, tapped to provide a sense of context, location and continuity. This is the case with Singapore, which is without a direct historical hinterland. But because it is small, economically strong and politically stable, there is need for the writer to construct missing continuities. This he does by looking not only at the past, but also into the present, its multi-racial, multi-ethnic character. For the present case, friends are both the crystallisation and detailing of this precise historical context, essential for the penetration of both contemporary culture as well as their antecedents. They represent experience as well as repository, a combination that makes them excellent conduits. In the case of Singapore, these cultures mean for the writer specifically the Chinese, Indian, Malay and Eurasian.

Rabindranath Tagore: Critic of the Enlightenment

Abstract: Rabindranath Tagore was not only a poet – but what else was he during his life? What is his legacy? He insisted he was not a philosopher or scholar; he was only briefly a political leader. He lectured extensively on the future of his country and the world, and with his work on alternative education and rural reconstruction demonstrated an alternative path for society. It is argued in this essay that Tagore can best be understood as a critic of the European Enlightenment, comparable to Herder. Isaiah Berlin gave a lecture on Tagore during the centenary celebrations, and concluded that Tagore “tried to tell the complex truth without over-simplification, and to that extent was perhaps listened to the less” (Berlin, “Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality”). With the world on the edge of ecological and social collapse, it is time we listen to him now.

Stepping into Meaning with “Iskandar J in His Studio”: Analysing the Poetry of Edwin Thumboo

Abstract: Drawing on Edwin Thumboo’s poem, “Iskandar J in His Studio , ” I illustrate our methodology for investigating meaning which is based on M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic theory. A systemic-functional perspective, with its emphasis on the semogenic (“meaning-making”) power of language, provides the ideal handle for investigating Thumboo’s poetry as not only an intentional act of meaning but also as a work of art. A poem, like any other text, is the complex realisation of three kinds of meaning: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Ideational meaning has to do with how we construe our world of experience. Interpersonal meaning has to do with how we use language to relate to those with whom we are speaking. Textual meaning concerns what gives texture to a text. The more cohesive and coherent the text, the greater is its texture.