The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back: Gender, Identity and Nation in the Literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines

by Grace V. S. Chin (Editor), Kathrina Mohd Daud (Editor)

Overview

This collection of essays examines how Southeast Asian women writers engage with the grand narratives of nationalism and the modern nation-state by exploring the representations of gender, identity and nation in the postcolonial literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Bringing to light the selected works of overlooked local women writers and providing new analyses of those produced by internationally-known women authors and artists, the essays situate regional literary developments within historicized geopolitical landscapes to offer incisive analyses and readings on how women and the feminine are imagined, represented, and positioned in relation to the Southeast Asian nation.The book, which features both cross-country comparative analyses and country-specific investigations, also considers the ideas of the nation and the state by investigating related ideologies, rhetoric, apparatuses, and discourses, and the ways in which they affect women’s bodies, subjectivities, and lived realities in both historical and contemporary Southeast Asian contexts. By considering how these literary expressions critique, contest, or are complicit in nationalist projects and state-mandated agendas, the collection contributes to the overall regional and comparative discourses on gender, identity and nation in Southeast Asian studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789811349904
Publisher:	Springer Nature Singapore
Publication date:	01/03/2019
Series:	Asia in Transition , #6
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr Grace V. S. Chin is a senior lecturer in the English Language and Literature Studies programme at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. Previously, she taught English Literature at Universiti Brunei Darussalam and The University of Hong Kong. In 2016, she was awarded senior fellowship by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian & Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, The Netherlands. Her areas of interest include the literatures of postcolonial Southeast Asia and Asian women’s writings, with focus on race and gender in contemporary societies and diasporas. Her articles have appeared in refereed journals such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, World Englishes, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, and The Journal of International Women’s Studies, as well as in books published by Springer, John Benjamins and Cambridge Scholars Publishing.


Dr Kathrina Mohd Daud is currently a lecturer in the English Studies programmeat the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, with a joint appointment in the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Centre for Islamic Studies and the Institute of Asian Studies. She has been a US State Department Scholar at the University of Louisville, Kentucky (2012), a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (2013), and a Visiting Fellow at the Southeast Asian Centre at the University of Washington (2014). She works at the intersections of Islam in literature, popular fiction and Asian literature, with a particular focus on Bruneian literature.

Table of Contents

Love, Penetration and the Nation: Angela Manalang Gloria’s “Revolt for the Hymen”.- Women Writing Wayang: A Comparative Study of Fictional Interventions in Mythology and National History in Post-Reform Indonesia.- Women in Urban Spaces in Singapore: Cisgender and Transgender Women in the works of Suchen Christine Lim and Alfian Sa’at.- State Motherhood and the United Family: Polygamous Bodies and the Patriarchal Nation in Contemporary Indonesian Literature.- Female Subjectivities in the Time of Authoritarian Rule.

Editorial Reviews

This book is not just significant for women readers, but also Southeast Asian scholars and feminist scholars in general. … this book is still rich in analyzes of how heteronormative patriarchal countries uphold gender expectations and the concept of femininity in Southeast Asia.” (Azalia Muchransyah,Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 176 (2-3), 2020)

From the Publisher