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.