“Local” and “national” transformations: Cultural globalization,heterogeneity,and Malaysian literature in English

Abstract

Much of early critical attention on cultural globalization has centred around the emphasis on homogenization. In recent decades, however, postcolonial scholars have tended to focus on the idea of heterogenization, suggesting that this has perhaps been the major outcome of cultural globalization. For them, globalization has opened a space for the periphery to have a voice, with the authority of the centre subject to question from the margins. Offering an examination of Malaysian literature in English and drawing its main theoretical insights from postcolonial studies, this article argues that the Malaysian nation-state’s embrace of globalization, and of English as a prime agent in the globalizing process, has given rise to a context where it is creative writing in the former colonial language that has become the very medium that offers resistance to forms of cultural hegemony embedded in state-sanctioned conceptions of national identity.

Introduction

This article aims to contribute to a consideration of how global processes can provide us with a site of practices to critique the restraints of national identity politics. It specifically explores how the cultural dimensions of globalization can open up new spaces to rethink the national. While engagement with politics and socio-economic issues has constituted a conspicuous area of scholarship in globalization studies on Malaysia of the last two decades, there has been relatively little explicit critical attention paid to the cultural aspects of globalization (for exceptions, see Mandal, 2001; Zawawi, 2004; Hoffstaedter, 2009; Abdul Rahman, 2011). In moving to address this gap in the existing literature, this essay focuses on the relationship between the nation-state and society vis-à-vis cultural and political processes and identifications in Malaysia. ¹ It engages with Malaysian literature in the English language, paying particular attention to the writings of K. S. Maniam, Charlene Rajendran, and Tash Aw, to demonstrate the nexus between globalization, the nation-state, and the aforementioned processes.

Theoretical debates on how cultural globalization has impacted on the nation-state have not been unified. On the one hand, some scholarship suggests that its sovereignty has been radically undermined by transnational corporations, the deregulation and liberalization of trade, and the inroads of foreign capital (Friedman, 1994). This has led to scholars urging us to consider the inevitability of the end of the nation-state and its concepts such as national identity and national culture (Appadurai, 1996).

On the other hand, there are studies that point to a marked strengthening of the nation-state’s structures in the face of globalizing pressures (Corner and Harvey, 1991). This is evidenced, for instance, in the nation-state’s response to the perceived “threat” of difference posed to the “purity” of its national identity and traditions by a supposedly enormous influx of immigrants traversing its boundaries. Afraid of losing their traditional authority over ethnic groups within their own borders at the same time as their economic and political sovereignty is being undermined by pressures at the supranational level (Papastergiadis, 2000: 76ff), nation-states have largely reacted by shoring up their narratives of national identity.

Significant in this context is Appadurai’s assertion that globalization theorists who observe the dissolution of the nation-state have tended to place more emphasis on cultural homogenization. Others, including postcolonial scholars like himself, have been inclined to focus on how the movement towards homogenization exists in tension with its opposite — “cultural differentiation, or cultural elaboration, or cultural complexity” (Wallerstein, 1991: 96). What this implies is not that globalization, in the form of the spread of a universalizing neoliberal capitalist culture anchored in the United States, destroys local values and cultural differences — the thesis propounded in the cultural homogenization argument — but that there is a “proliferation of cultural fusion or ‘hybridity’ that occurs as global influences become absorbed and adapted in a host of local settings” (Sinclair, 2004: 66).

Fredric Jameson’s view of the contradictory meanings of globalization as a site of cultural crises is worth recalling here. In The Cultures of Globalization, Jameson points to a paradox in the debates describing globalization as the source of both transnational domination and, at the same time, the liberation of local cultures from the nation-state (1998: xiii). Such arguments endorse the view that globalization is not a totalizing cultural process. While it may be accompanied by a tightening of state control, it is also characterized by creative responses from the margins, where cultural experience is in various ways “lifted out” of its traditional “anchoring” in national localities (Tomlinson, 2003: 273). Thus, rather than subscribing to the interpretation that globalization functions as a homogenizing threat to local cultures, I would agree with postcolonial critics who read global processes as providing conditions for the local “to come into representation” (Hall, 1997: 27). This suggests that marginalized social groups are not passive participants in top-down regimes of globalization, but can appropriate “strategies of representation, organization and social change through access to global systems” to empower themselves and transform their conditions (Ashcroft, 2009: 93).

In the context of this discussion, it is useful to note that while postcolonial theory has focused on “the cultural basis of history”, globalization theory, in turn, has drawn attention to “the cultural basis of the economic” (Krishnaswamy, 2002: 107). This suggests that it is in the domain of culture where globalization and postcolonial studies most clearly overlap. Indeed, one of the key tenets of postcolonial studies has been its focus on the cultural dimensions of global processes. Imre Szeman asserts that “[f]ar from being secondary to the politics and economics of imperialism and colonialism, postcolonial critics have convincingly argued that culture must be seen as essential to the creation, production, and maintenance of [power] relations” (Szeman, 2001: 213–14). This is also a central strand in globalization theory. “Culture”, as Wallerstein cogently asserts, “is always the weapon of the powerful” (Wallerstein, 1991: 99).

Not only in the broader global framework, but also within nations, culture has been a key site for creating and maintaining hegemony. In the postcolonial state, for example, the terrain of contestation for the unequal meeting of cultures is frequently the “national”. Homi Bhabha contends that postcolonial states often invoke the “virtues” of “progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past” to “rationalize the authoritarian, ‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest” (Bhabha, 1990: 4; emphasis added). Indeed, the category of “national” has singularly powerful resonances for how the state understands the nation in cultural terms. Implicit in the conceptualization of the national is the control of space and time. This regulation of time–space has also been identified as “the defining abstract principle behind globalization” (Sinclair, 2004: 67). The standardizing of the cultural within the national is particularly important in Malaysia, where, I argue, national hegemony in an era of global flows is invariably asserted through discourses and symbols of cultural dominance. ²

It has also to be pointed out that globalization is by no means a recent phenomenon in Malaysia. Indeed, the impinging of other worlds — through trade, war, conquest, pilgrimage, colonialism and its many diasporas — has been a pivotal feature of Malaysia’s cultural history. Its genealogies in the maritime encounters of the pre-colonial Malay World, including the latter’s “complex connectivity” (Tomlinson, 2003) with yet other worlds, attest amply to the “globalness” of its constitution. However, the cosmopolitanisms of these “connected histories” and cultural geographies (Gabriel and Rosa, 2012) have been regulated into homogeneities by the state’s “normalizing tendencies” (Bhabha, 1990: 4). Thus, one is asked to forget that Munshi Abdullah, a citizen of the Malay World of the early nineteenth century and hailed today as the father of modern Malay literature, was a Tamil-speaking Muslim, the first translator of The Bible in Malay, ³ and of mixed Arab and Indian origins. Indeed, the idea of cultures and histories colliding and connecting in irrevocably entangled routes across time and space — undermining settled understandings of “homeland” and “elsewhere”, “us” and “them”, “indigenous” and “immigrants” — remains a site of struggle between state and citizen, centre and margins, local and global, in contemporary Malaysian cultural politics.

In using literature in English to demonstrate the cultural effects of globalization, this article ultimately explores the idea of the nation as an imagined cultural space. Although most debates on globalization have viewed English as a mode of linguistic and cultural imperialism that undermines the values of local contexts (see Phillipson, 1992, 2002; Canagarajah, 1999; for a discussion of the Malaysian context, see Coluzzi, 2012), others have gestured to the reverse trend, that is, that English is not incompatible with local needs, functions, and desires. For these scholars, English can empower marginalized communities by providing them with a “space to speak from” (Hall, 1997: 28).

Local and national

I shall proceed by defining the key terms framing my discussion. By “local” I refer to configurations of people as well as their practices and experiences that exist “below” the nation-state. By “national” I refer specifically to the nation-state and its processes under whose homogenizing “political roof” differences at the level of the local are gradually subsumed, making the concept of the national “a powerful source of meanings for modern cultural identities” (Hall et al., 1992: 292). Indeed, one of the principal means by which states have sought to regulate cultural identity in the face of the flows of ideologies and peoples perceived as a threat to their sovereignty is by stressing the comforts of sameness. The tendency is that as global flows intensify, state structures become more coercive in efforts to bind their populations into a homogeneous whole. As Ien Ang asserts: “The very imagination of the nation-state as a bounded entity is part and parcel of the performative work of states in their efforts to secure nation-wide managerial control” (Ang, 2010: 2). This aspect of the “managerial control” of the state is clearly at work in the Malaysian government’s efforts to construct a “national” Malaysian culture, a point to which I will return.

It is in this context that Stuart Hall also warns of the rise of “managed” forms of national identity in many developed nation-states. He argues that in Britain, for example, “one can see a regression to a very defensive and highly dangerous form of national identity, which is driven by a very aggressive form of racism” (Hall, 1997: 26). This is the case also with developing nation-states such as Malaysia. Although it had ceased accepting large-scale immigration from China and India by the 1930s, the state is still mindful of “the problem” posed to the coherence of its discourses by its minority Indian and Chinese ethnic communities, a majority of whom are descendants of immigrants transported in bulk from their homelands as cheap labour for British Malaya’s burgeoning rubber plantations and tin mines. The issue of the “managerial control” of the national narrative by the Malay-hegemonic state has been a central theme of Malaysia’s cultural politics since Independence in 1957 to the present day.

Such pressures exerted on the local by the national are aggravated in the context of globalization. Just as the national is dominated by the global, the local is dominated by both the national and the global. This brings me to Abdul Rahman Embong’s reminder that although they might represent different interests and exist in an asymmetrical relationship with one another, it is more useful to think of the global, the national, and the local as being entangled in a relationship of “accommodation, adaptation, and adjustments” (Abdul Rahman, 2011: 15). These complex tensions and interdependencies have the potential to yield new meanings. Thus, although Hall expressed concern at the rise of exclusionary discourses of the national in countries such as Britain, he also gestures to the new synergies that are emerging from the interaction of the local, national, and global. He asks that we consider the positive consequences of the relationship between configurations of power from above and what he calls “globalization from below”. ⁴ What this suggests is that irrespective of how determined the nation-state is in managing its peoples’ diversities, the cultural space of the nation always-already contains within it sites of struggle and new meaning.

Literature and imagination as cultural practice

Globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai has elaborated that the imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order” (1990: 7). He adds:

[I]magination is today … [n]o longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world de-fined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people) and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibilities. (1990: 7; emphasis in original)

As a staging ground for action, “the image, the imagined, [and] imaginary … are all terms which direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes”, he argues (1990: 7). Thus, following Appadurai, more than reflections of the existing social context or narratives of escape from it, literary narratives serve the specific political function of directing us to the possibilities for change in that social context.

The Malaysian novelist K. S. Maniam has specifically highlighted the productive role that literature can play in an era of accelerating globalization. Delivering a keynote address in Australia in 1996, an historical juncture when globalization was pursued actively by the Malaysian government, Maniam argues that literature and the imagination can provide vital strategies to resist the “artificially categorized” notion of a “monocultural centre” propagated by the state. ⁵ Asserting the importance of being a local with a global — or international, as he terms it — perspective, Maniam warns that it is “multiplicity in thought, memory and space” that promises equality for all Malaysians. Locating his own works in the historical elisions of the dominant narrative of the nation, Maniam, a third-generation heir to his nation’s Indian diasporic history, advances the tropes of the tiger and the chameleon as two different models of cultural identity (Maniam, 1996: 45). The tiger, a creature traditionally associated with the dominant (Malay) culture and national ethos, represents, Maniam suggests, a reified model of identity. Rooted to a space that is strictly defined territorially, namely the jungle, the tiger is unable to make that “leap” across boundaries; it lacks the ability to re-invent itself. The chameleon, on the other hand, with its ability to “inhabit, simultaneously, different intellectual, cultural and imaginative spaces” (Maniam, 1997: 8), is able to cross and re-cross cultural boundaries. Constituted by and of “multiplicity”, it is always open to translation. By urging Malaysians to cultivate a chameleon consciousness, Maniam implicitly argues that all national-cultural configurations are “glocal” (Robertson, 1992) — at once local and global. The “glocal” is resonant with the “in-between” cultural space by which Bhabha (1994) argues all subjects of the nation are constituted. With its “capacity to shift the frame, and move between varying range of foci […] out of which varying identities can be formed and reformed in different situations” (Featherstone, 1995: 10), the chameleon represents a mode of adaptation to global flows; it is always plural and mobile rather than unitary and stable. In this context, Maniam’s choice of the older vocabulary of the relations between nations — “internationalization” or “internationalism” — rather than globalization, is a significant subtlety. By retaining the use of the older term, Maniam keeps critical attention on the “nation” and his discussions within the frame of the “national”.

Maniam’s understanding of the nexus between nation and globalization, one that informs the ideological framework of this paper, is complemented by Charlene Rajendran’s poetic treatment of this theme. In “Mangosteen Crumble” (1999: 27), Rajendran uses food as a metaphor for cultural and social processes, allowing her, like Maniam, to rework old or familiar symbols and infuse the local with new meaning in the context of new global imperatives. Juxtaposing the “local” mangosteen and its “hard casings/whose stains are so feared” with the equally local durian, which “reigns king”, ⁶ she invites Malaysians to a culinary experiment:

Why don’t we cook-up

a tangy concoction

a mangosteen puree

with sugar and spice;

and add to the mixture

a crunchy crust pastry

make crumble of sorts

with fresh cream on the top?

Indeed, globalization presents Malaysians with choices that they might never have had if their culinary imaginings were confined mainly to the paradigmatic limitations of the national fruit, the durian. Rather than just enact closures, with cultural globalization, the local mangosteen has been offered a range of new possibilities for transformation — it might be pureed “with sugar and spice” or combined with “a crunchy crust pastry” with “fresh cream on the top”. The possibilities for its reinvention are endless. However, Rajendran’s emergent configuration, the “mangosteen crumble”, with its “glocal” mélange of textures and flavours, has to wait its turn to be “born”. The Malaysian state, the poem suggests, tends to prefer the outdated recipe for cultural accommodation symbolized by the “banoffee pie/and durian ice cream/and pineapple jam” configuration, each flavour distinct in its separateness. There is no representational space for admixture and mingling, for cultural “newness” and multiplicity, to enter the nation.

Decades after colonial Malaya was identified as a classic “plural society” (Furnivall, 1941), the state template of national culture, analogous with what Rajendran suggests is the state’s stale “banoffee pie/and durian ice cream/and pineapple jam” recipe, continues to represent the nation’s various cultures as existing “side by side, yet without mingling”. The persistence in speaking of cultures as located and locatable within their own, self-contained, cultural grid — in other words, as already constituted as “Malay”, “Chinese”, or “Indian”, each with its standardized inventory of cultural markers vis-à-vis dress, music, and cuisine — carries significant implications. These namings, underpinned by state assumptions about indigeneity and belonging, constitute the process by which hegemonic visions of race and culture are inserted into the national. They function as markers of absolute difference that obscure not only the heterogeneity within race and ethnic identity but also the everyday social realities and cultural blurrings between ethnic groups on the ground. Indeed, the fixing of boundaries between cultural communities and the producing and reproducing of notions of fictive sameness and difference in national policies and discourses, are the assured means by which the Malaysian state keeps itself in power. ⁷

It is in this context that one must make sense of the state-sponsored advertising slogan, “Malaysia,Truly Asia”. Launched by the Ministry of Tourism in 1999 to position Malaysia “as a top tourist destination in the region” (Prime Minister’s Department, 2001) and given extensive coverage in national and international media, this successful campaign was aimed at exploiting the global purchase of Malaysia’s local diversities. “Malaysian-ness” was marketed as an all-inclusive master brand, one that was simultaneously local and global. Cultural difference becomes a commodity that is produced, given meaning, contained, and then packaged for consumption in the global market. Thus, an apparent contradiction emerges. While the state moves to commodify differences between identities and categories to exploit the nation’s cultural capital in order to serve its interests in the global marketplace, it works internally to flatten those differences in the name and interest of the “national”. On closer examination, however, both operate on the master narrative of homogenization. The global narrative reifies differences between cultures. The national narrative suppresses differences through its centralizing assimilationist tendencies. In both, the actual “multiplicity” of Malaysian identities and identifications is obscured. By overlooking or dismissing emerging cultural crossovers and transethnic commonalities, the dominant cultural narratives of the state work to consolidate the place of “Malay” as the central identity and of “Chinese” and “Indian” identities as the marginal “other”.

Literature in English: The global in the national

Maniam and Rajendran’s reiterations of cultural “multiplicity” gain salience in the context of a nation-state that has, since 1971, especially through its interventions in the arts and other areas of cultural production, increasingly moved to counter notions of cultural heterogeneity through the institutionalizing of “national” traditions.

A relevant paradigm in this context is the category of “National Literature”, which refers exclusively to literary content in Bahasa Malaysia (or Malay), the National Language. The defining of the national in such terms occludes the rich diversities of Malaysian society as well as of the literatures produced by the nation’s various ethnic and linguistic communities. ⁸ The marginalization of English and its cultural productions by state-led processes since the 1970s has paralleled the steady growth of an ethnicized cultural politics in the country. The complex entanglements between English and the Malaysian state acquired yet another configuration in the globalizing 1990s. Viewed as the language of global business and finance, English was reintroduced into the popular consciousness through the national education system. The subsequent shifts in language policy and the contentious reactions from various interest groups to this still ongoing issue point to the fraught cultural politics associated with language in Malaysia.

Be that as it may, the renewed focus on English in the 1990s as a result of state manoeuvres to embrace English in an era of globalization together with increasing levels of literacy in a post-NEP society have created an environment where English has been the source of much creativity and cultural production. This has resulted in the rising prominence of a new generation of creative practitioners in the language. Whereas, at the time of its inception in the 1950s and right up to the 1980s, the field mainly comprised ethnic Chinese and Indians, it now includes a sizeable number of ethnic Malays, many of whom have received their education abroad in the English language. Their current status as urban, cosmopolitan, middle-class Malays makes them a minority community within the larger Malay-educated and mainly Malay-speaking community. Together with the pioneering generation of literary practitioners in English such as Wong Phui Nam, Ee Tiang Hong, Lee Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando, Shirley Lim Geok Lin, and Maniam, who had already begun writing or publishing their works before the inception of race-based state policies in the 1970s, this new generation of writers (such as Karim Raslan, Dina Zaman, and Huzir Sulaiman), has been producing a significant body of works that calls into question the insiderisms of the local. While still strongly identifying with the nation, their discourses of identity, as a result of their global outlook, has generated in them a strong desire to interrogate falsely homogenized conceptions of Malayness. Their attempts to remake “Malay” identity in the English language constitute a doubly subversive act. ⁹

Global processes of mobility have also produced an emergent body of literature by authors such as Tash Aw, Preeta Samarasan, Rani Manicka, and Tan Twan Eng, several of whom are winners of prestigious literary prizes, ¹⁰ now part of the Malaysian literary diaspora in the West. The dissemination of literary works between these authors’ place of origin and the lands where these texts are produced, translated (both in a cultural and linguistic sense), and consumed (in the majority of cases, in the USA, UK, and Australia) constitutes a new site for reinventing the meanings of Malaysian-ness. Although based abroad, these writers have returned again and again in their texts to their Malaysian homeland to deliver a sharp critique of the forms of national culture and identity that the Malaysian state promotes through its homogenizing traditions. While still displaying an attachment to the local, the material implications of their being at a distance from the home country, and therefore of being “lifted out” of the imposed ideological and territorial limitations of the state, especially its fixities of time and space, mean that these writers have experienced cultural “dis-embedding” and “re-embedding”, two features key to globalization processes (Eriksen 2007, 8–9). This interplay of the local and global produces a new sense of the national. The effects of their distance and “dis-embedding” from the homeland and its cultural practices and traditions, and “re-embedding” in the time–space of the new location reconstitute themselves in the form of the ambivalences and discontinuities of place and history in their works.

For these “doubly diasporic” authors, then, it is the multiplicity of Malaysian national-cultural identity, rather than its false unities, which is foregrounded. They use their situatedness in the interstices of the local and global to explore the fundamental instabilities in the meaning of the “national”. Like Maniam and Rajendran, they privilege overlaps and difference rather than homogeneity and fixity. But in ways that depart from the previous group, this newer generation of writers, because of the heightened multiplicity of their geographical, ideological, and cultural location, further complicate national discourses of place and identity by deploying self-reflexive techniques of narrativization. By blurring the distinction between story and discourse to draw attention to the constructedness of their narratives, texts such as Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) call into question the stable cultural boundaries of the nation, and the reliability of its dominant narratives, from a location outside of it.

Mapping invisible worlds

While, for the reasons mentioned above, Aw’s first novel has readily lent itself to analyses of its global and transnational underpinnings vis-à-vis Malaysian nationalism (see, for example, Tay 2011), his second novel, Map of the Invisible World (2009), has yet to be explored from this perspective. One of the reasons for this could be that the novel is set largely in Indonesia and appears to be centred on the archipelago’s history and its negotiations with nationalism more than it does with Malaysia’s. However, a close reading would suggest that the text is less concerned with pointing to the distinctive historical and cultural experiences arising out of specific contexts of nationalism than it is with foregrounding the larger, transnational, narrative of the shared vicissitudes, promises, and dangers of nationalism. Furthermore, the text’s embeddedness in the multiplicity of the global deliberately destabilizes and denounces as artificial the hard, territorial boundaries between the nation-states of Indonesia and Malaysia, as I will later demonstrate. In fact, the global trajectory of disembedding culled from the ambivalent space that the text occupies between nations compels it to push outwards, against geopolitical boundaries, so as to reverse and complicate the territorial-based nationalist mapping of the larger Malay World into the smaller, separate, and separable (and, during the period known as the Konfrontasi, also opposing) states of Indonesia and Malaysia. The novel’s expanded spatial canvas allows it to offer, both through its thematic and narrative structure, a critique of restrictive visions of nationalism and belonging irrespective of national context.

Encompassing both Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1960s, the main spatial and temporal strands of the novel are set at a particularly unstable moment in national history — the capital city of Jakarta in 1964, with Indonesia teetering on the brink of “some impending disaster” (2009: 2). ¹¹ This was President Sukarno’s “year of living dangerously” — the title of his Independence Day speech and also the tense prelude to the 1965 coup spearheaded by his political successor Suharto that resulted in the loss of more than half a million lives in the name of an anti-Communist purge. The novel’s narrative present centres around the time when Sukarno’s military police were zealously rounding up Dutch citizens for forcible repatriation in a move to obliterate every vestige of Indonesia’s colonial past. This climate of nationalist xenophobia was exacerbated by the aggressive policy of Konfrontasi, a territorial dispute waged by the Indonesian government against the creation in 1963 of its (formerly British-colonized) neighbouring state of Malaysia.

To foreground the complexities of the local over the neat unities of the national, Aw traces the “messy” personal (his)stories of his characters and the ties of solidarity they create with one another. There are several lines of relationships introduced, those forged by birth or adoption as well as other affiliations. Central to the novel’s human(e) core are the two brothers, Adam and Johan, who were orphaned and then separated at a young age. Johan is adopted by a Malaysian couple and taken to live in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, where he leads a life of hedonistic affluence. He is tormented by guilt for leaving his younger brother behind in the orphanage in Sumatra. Adam is taken from the orphanage to the remote island of Nusa Perdo, where he is raised by his adoptive father, an artist named Karl de Willigen. Born in Buru to Dutch parents, Karl has taken up Indonesian citizenship after renouncing the Dutch language and embracing Indonesia as his homeland. The novel opens 11 years after Adam leaves the orphanage; now a 16-year-old, he watches as Karl, transformed overnight into the national other in spite of his remonstrations that he is “as Indonesian as anyone else on this island. My passport says so. Skin colour has nothing to do with it” (3), is arrested by soldiers at their island home. The focal point of the narrative is Adam’s quest to regain Karl. He travels to Jakarta, where he seeks Karl’s former girlfriend, another of the novel’s displaced characters, an American named Margaret Bates — “conceived on one continent, born on another, and raised on four — five if you count Australia” (16). In the maelstrom of the capital city — with its “maze of dead-ends and unnamed streets” (70) — and the mayhem unleashed by Sukarno’s final years in office, Adam meets, through Margaret, her Leiden-educated, Sumatran-born teaching assistant, Din. Unknown to Adam, Din is a communist who, frustrated by the inaction of Sukarno’s government to deliver aid to the poor, is hatching a plot to assassinate the president on Independence Day. Adam is drawn unwittingly into this conspiracy by Din’s promise to help him find his brother Johan. To help Adam locate his father, and later to help her find Adam who has fallen under the sway of Din’s diehard revolutionary politics, Margaret enlists the assistance of two of her close friends in Jakarta — the Australian journalist Mick Matsoukis and fellow American, Bill Schneider. Adam is finally rescued through Zubaidah, an acquaintance of Din’s, through whose help Karl is found and reunited with Adam. Margaret is also brought together with Karl. The novel concludes with Adam about to embark on a journey to Malaysia to look for Johan.

Reunions abound in the novel. Indeed, the need to recover connections, a central thematic concern, repudiates the polarizing, inward-looking nativist discourse that turns people like the ethnic-Madurese Neng, Adam’s best friend at school, and the locally-born and thoroughly assimilated Karl, on account of his “foreigner’s skin” (32; emphasis in original), into “dirty monster[s]” and “bloody foreigner[s]” deserving elimination (39). In this atmosphere of tense nationalism, with its clear-cut constructions of “we” and “them”, “inside” and “outside”, Adam, with his “straight hair and brittle jawline and fragile cheekbones” (32), learns an important lesson about being “different” (3; emphasis in original). He realizes that if he is to be accepted, he must “learn how to be like everyone else” (34). The separatist “we/they” logic is also clearly evident in the terms of the war of Konfrontasi that Indonesia wages against Malaysia. As Din sums it up, “We will invade them and crush them, all those Malaysian puppets. […] [T]hey are not masters of their own destiny. We are” (149; emphasis added). Similarly, Adam, too, as an Indonesian in Malaysia, feels assailed by the sense that he is different, a predicament with charged overtones not only during the Konfrontasi but also in the contemporary period. Ongoing contestations over national and cultural sovereignty between the two nations often cast each other in oppositional “us/they” terms, erasing centuries of connected histories and solidarities. “Everyone knows Indonesians are a wild bunch. They’re not really the same as us” (222; emphasis added), intones Johan’s father, ironically.

To this end, the text deliberately juxtaposes the hard, territorial-based militant nationalism espoused by state leaders with the slippery ground that its characters must navigate before they can understand the meaning of home. The fluid landscape constructed by the text’s ambulating narrative as it flows across physical space and chronological time — between Adam and Johan, Indonesia and Malaysia, the past and the present — invests the narrative with a suppleness that comes from it not being pinned down to a unitary temporal and spatial logic. “Home”, the third-person narrator tells us, “was not necessarily where you were born, or even where you grew up, but something else entirely, something fragile that could exist anywhere in the world” (12).

Consequently, Aw’s attempt from his location in the in-betweenness of the global to re-imagine national space leads to the construction of multiple Indonesias. There is the pastoral Indonesia of “simpler pleasures” (31) that is nurtured by the idealistic vision of Adam’s father, Karl. It is this benevolent world, unmarked by fear and hatred of the other, that the latter hopes would mould both his young son’s and his nation’s future. Then there is the Indonesia by the ocean in Perdo, which both soothes and terrifies Adam with “the endlessness of its possibilities” (33–4). It is his initiation into the mysteries of this world “of kaleidoscopic fish, purple sea urchins and pulsating starfish” (34) that sensitizes Adam to the “unofficial history” (32) of Indonesia — “about the opium wars, Catholicism and the destructive power of religion, and the unjust conquering of Asia by Europe” (34). There is also the “revolutionary Republic of Indonesia” (190) founded on Sukarno’s ideals, a world unmarked by poverty, corruption, and class oppression, that Din hopes to resurrect through the violent crucible of armed struggle. There is then the pacifist Indonesia of the student leader Zubaidah, an unwilling representative of her country’s burgeoning nouveau-riche with their connections to the political elite. It is this new Indonesia — of money, privilege, and business patronage — and not the old-world diplomacy that characterizes the Indonesia experienced by Margaret and her generation of friends, that is able to locate and rescue Karl. There is also the Indonesia of riots, famine, and “madness” (322) — “the biggest, dirtiest, most wretched and corrupt city in the world” (138) — that expatriate Westerners like Mick and Bill experience and wish to rescue if not reform. Then, there is the Indonesia “of endless possibilities” (21), symbolized by the Bali of the 1930s when the young lovers Margaret and Karl first meet at a “trance[-like]” dance where the music “surged and ebbed without pause” (88–9). This Indonesia of fresh romance and promise — “something warm and clear and soft” (88) — is juxtaposed with the “sordid” (20) and decaying Old Jakarta of the present that Margaret inhabits, its “air filled with the aroma of incense and cooking and blocked drains” (70). These are the invisible maps of the mind — domains “insubstantial and flimsy” (148) — that Aw excavates to interrogate the hard and unyielding certitudes of nationalism. This proliferation of Indonesias in the novel confounds the nationalist belief in the unassailabilty of home as a unitary space.

Like the competing and multiple stories in Harmony that point to the impossibility of wholeness, commensurability and, ultimately, the authorized validity of national truth, the multiplicity of homes at the thematic and stylistic centre of Aw’s second novel also suggests the importance of freeing oneself of other people’s inventions, from the metanarratives such as nationalism, colonialism, and imperalism that subsume the lives of individuals. Din, who prides himself on being a “true revolutionary” (190), is consumed by the nationalistic desire to recuperate the “real history” (208) of Indonesia from the distortions and omissions of European historiographical methods. To Adam’s disclosure that he cannot “remember anything” about his past (119), Din, who holds on to a fixed view of the past, responds, “You need to find your past, your real past. […] Because to be ignorant of one’s true history is to live in a void. […] [Y]ou don’t really exist.” (208). In contrast to Din, Zubaidah, who is assigned a place in the moral centre of the novel, tells Adam that because orphans “don’t have their own history” they are free to “create it for themselves” (151). Zubaidah’s belief in the invented nature of history reverberates with what the novel suggests is the power of personal memory to release oneself from the manipulations of official history and essential nationalism. Thus, Adam regards his personal history with ambivalence — it is a space of “great emptiness” (5), but also a place of creative regeneration, capable of producing new narratives and self-imaginings.

Johan, on the other hand, longs to banish his past into oblivion. “I don’t want to remember anything. […] Nothing at all”, he pleads (107). Yet, the text undercuts his belief that one can dispense with personal history. The past confronts Johan every night in his dreams, which are haunted by images of the orphanage and memories of the other children’s tears. Though they struggle in their different ways with the past, the novel makes it abundantly clear that the lives of both siblings across the border are haunted by their separation.

Furthermore, while he acknowledges the occlusions of Western historiography, Aw suggests, through the limitations of Din’s patriotic vision of the nation, that the master narrative of nationalism is also capable of generating its own exclusions. Schooled on books written by Western scholars and cartographers in which the history of Indonesia began with the discovery of sea routes from Europe to Asia, Din longs to write a “secret history” of the Indonesian islands east of Bali, a “lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners” (22). Yet, even as it highlights Din’s desire to recuperate the secret history of the “lost” Indonesian islands, the novel ironizes his longing for a “true and authentic” Indonesian culture free from foreign or Western inscriptions. Din himself, having spent “three whole years” (116) as a young student in Europe, would have, whether he wanted to or not, been changed by his experiences in a different cultural system; the narrator tells us that Margaret sometimes found his ways to be “completely Western” (16). Another significant detail appears in Chapter Fourteen, which works to undermine Din’s assumptions of cultural authenticity. The chapter opens with the third-person narrator praising the poet Hanawi for celebrating in his work the “authentic” lives of the farmers and fishermen of Perdo. Hanawi’s ability to connect with the simple ways of life of the island folk was mainly because, the narrator tells us, he wrote pantuns, a traditional Malay verse form. After focusing at some length on the poet’s ability to invoke the “authentic” ways of life of the Indonesian peasants, the text then raises the crucial question: “Does it matter, then, to find out that Hanawi was not, in fact, born on one of these remote islands but into a prosperous family of Chinese immigrants in Malang?” (146). Although we soon find out that it is Din who speaks these lines, what is important is that when this question is first raised it is presented as emanating from the novel’s central narrating consciousness. As it turns out, it is Din who has posed this rhetorical question to Adam to persuade the latter, who has no sure knowledge of his past and his birth origins, that it is one’s commitment to a cause, not one’s place of birth or class background, that determines one’s political destiny. Din’s argument is that Hanawi, born to a wealthy family in the cosmopolitan Dutch-built city of Malang in Java, and not therefore having origins in rural Perdo itself, was nevertheless able to invoke with empathy the quality of life of the poor islanders. In his attempt to inveigle Adam into his conspiracy to topple Sukarno, however, Din masks an important detail. For ethno-nationalists like Din, a nation is a construct whose essence is upheld by a rejection of everything outside its boundaries. This belief in the security of borders holds out, for nationalists like him, the promise of homogeneity’s safety. Thus, he repeatedly denounces as “stupid” (118, 119) Sukarno’s transmigration policy, which encouraged movements of people from densely populated islands to Indonesia’s less populated ones, for altering the racial composition of the islands. The certainties of his identity categories and boundaries threatened by such crossings, Din tells Adam, “Javanese should live in Java, not in Nusa Tenggara, Sumatra should remain Sumatran, and so on” (118). The insularity of the view of having the nation’s “genetically native” (33; emphasis in original) communities living within their “own” demarcated borders is revealing of Din’s belief in stable identities and fixed belonging, and consequently of his inability to decipher imagined national communities. The novel thus makes it clear that, steeped in essentialist nationalist certitudes, Din would not have considered someone like Hanawi to be “authentically” Indonesian on account of the latter’s origins in China. In fact, Aw, whose own ancestors emigrated from southern China to Malaya, urges us to believe that a purist nationalist like Din, with his obssessive interest in race, skin tone, and colour and who prides himself for being a “real Indonesian” (115; emphasis in original), would not have regarded someone who looked like Hanawi to be “really” Indonesian. Significant also is that in his overtures to Adam, Din should make it a point to repeatedly highlight their outward, visible, resemblance to each other (and here the novel’s title inheres with meaning through its pointing to other — invisible — nations and imaginings). Din tells Adam that they “have the same skin. Same colour” (115) and that he is “clearly Sumatran […] just like [him]” (118). Din, then, can only frame the making of affiliative ties, and hence imagined communities, in the language of race as a function of the physical or corporeal body. Indeed, to the ethno-nationalist mind, in which meanings are fixed and locked in the past, ethnic Chinese can never become Indonesian. Imprisoned in the myth of race and homeland, individuals like Din can only see ethnic Chinese through a lens that positions them as the national and racial other, people who do not really belong in Indonesia. “Foreigners Chinese go to hel” (3), proclaims graffiti on walls as shops run by ethnic Chinese and houses belonging to them are burned to the ground when communal tensions, never far from the surface, explode. The resentment, even xenophobia, inherent in this extreme form of nationalism insists on branding even the long-domiciled and assimilated community of Peranakan (or Straits Chinese), to which Hanawi belongs, as “immigrants” and “foreigners”.

Indeed, Aw’s novel suggests that home is not an ontologically stable concept and national identity is never a question of a simple retrieval of the pre-colonial past — what individuals like Din, who have uncritically assimilated the anti-colonial ideology of nationalism, regard as the “true” or “real past” (208). Aw’s alternative imagining posits that home, like nation, is not a ready-made, already-constructed category, with firmly-drawn insides and outsides, but a space of flux and indeterminacy. Just as there is no foundational or pre-existing cultural essence, there is also no final or fixed identity. Both on a thematic and ideological level, the novel makes clear that Adam must leave his bucolic and predictable existence on Perdo for the cataclysmic instability of the city — “so enormous, so overwhelming, so chaotic” (29) — before he can begin to understand the meaning of home.

In this regard, Aw suggests that the separation that plagues the lives of his characters on both sides of the border is also a comment on the losses experienced by the modern nation-states of Malaysia and Indonesia. If nationalist amnesia writes off prior connections and cosmopolitan affiliations, including the other’s imbrication in our history, Aw’s novel sets up an invisible looking-glass border between Malaysia and Indonesia that supplements rather than separates — Adam’s struggle to remember mirrors Johan’s longing to forget, the dizzying noise and flashing neon lights of the “fast, young city” of Kuala Lumpur, which “had no past, only the present” (53), are reconstituted as “the past glory in the streets of Old Jakarta” when “shops contained sacks of spices and tea and fragrant wood bound for Europe” (57). Thus, instead of asking us to view Indonesia and Malaysia as each other’s other, the novel proposes a more dialogic understanding of the national. The (re)unions, pairings, and affinities forged in the novel — Adam and Johan in the main, but also Adam and Zubaidah, Margaret and Karl — are suggestive of the indivisible fraternity that binds people to one another irrespective of their nationalities.

Adam and Johan’s common experience of the sea hints at this larger, indivisible, historical and cultural solidarity. Johan’s transcendent experience in the sea off the coast of Malaysia — “fields of coral, which, in the moonlight, looked like a shadowy map of an unknown world where the boundaries were uncertain and the countries kept changing shape” (131) recalls Adam’s experience of unboundedness when swimming in the sea in Perdo, where he had “surrendered his body to the waves, his arms and legs moving with a freedom he had never known” (153). The sea is that ambivalent space that separates but also connects, where the estrangement between the self and other, reinforced by nationalism’s fear of the other, dissolves and destabilizes; in the sea, the siblings are able to shed the “blankness” of their “aloneness”, their “yawning emptiness” (308). Like the Seven Maidens islands of Aw’s first novel — an unbounded, shifting terrain shrouded in myths and legends where strange figures appear and disappear, the “shadowy” and “uncertain” sea in the second novel is that paradigmatic space of confluence and mutual imbrication that is able to overcome the artificial boundaries of nationalism. The novel ends on a note of hopeful re-unification as Adam prepares to travel across boundaries to embrace Johan, his provisional other.

Within this context, it is useful to also consider the text’s characterization of Margaret, whose training and positioning as a Western anthropologist in the “Third World” — when she first meets Adam, Margaret’s immediate thought is that he offers her “an interesting case study” (83) — has relied on the rupture between the constructs of self and other, with the other often represented as a lack. Through the course of the novel, Margaret gradually realizes that her unshakeable faith in the idea of pure traditions and discrete differences, which she had used as a guide not only in her fieldsite in the jungles of New Guinea, but also in Jakarta city, has resulted in little more than disappointments. Indeed, the novel’s ideological thrust to eschew the notion of fixed othering and difference suggests that “her shortcomings, her misjudgement” (321) have as their source her orientalizing perspective. At the novel’s end, Margaret realizes from her failed interactions with others, particularly Din, whom she found “sometimes primitive” (16), that she must abandon her anthropologist’s Eurocentric faith in the hard lines dividing centre and periphery, self and other to “surrender to myths, to the uncertainty of stories, to the failure of logic” (293).

The interrogation of dominant configurations of power in Aw’s texts goes further than the earlier generation of literary writings to problematize national identity. The global trajectory of these works holds up to scrutiny the very notion of what “Malaysian-ness” itself might mean. This is precisely why I would disagree with the assertion made by literary critic Philip Holden that the increasingly global trajectory of contemporary Malaysian literature in English could be a sign that such a literature is no longer able to address national concerns. In his article “Global Malaysian Novels: Prospects and Possibilities”, Holden, in his analysis of works by Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng, argues that “If we judge them in relation to a previous generation of writers, their concerns seem tangential to questions of the nation” (Holden, 2012: 54). He offers as evidence the absence in their texts of a “representative cast of characters of different ethnicities that embody the nation” (Holden, 2012: 54), a feature that, as he observes correctly, was clearly present in the works of the earlier generation of writers. But, rather than see this as a lack vis-à-vis these writers’ investment in the national, I would argue that these works no longer feel compelled to assemble a “representative” cast of Malaysians on the basis of ethnicity. So, instead of taking this as a sign, as Holden does, of their inability or unwillingness to engage directly with national issues, I would suggest that their embeddedness in the interstices of the glocal location offers them the confidence and the insights to reject previously taken-for-granted assumptions and symbols of nationness. Their global narratives work to challenge stable representations of national and local space and illuminate sites of flux and disequilibrium. The trope of racial indeterminacy, the refusal to designate race as a clear and coherent category, in their works exemplifies a central strand in this challenge. Furthermore, given that ambiguities of race are often suppressed or erased in national narratives, these works attempt to reclaim such obscured realities. Jasper Lim, in Harmony, whom the text constructs as heir to his nation’s multiple histories, is of “indeterminable” genealogy. “Not brown, not yellow, not white” (Aw, 2005: 17), his “race” eludes taxonomies of naming, refuses to submit to classification — a subversive act in a country where race is an over-determined category of identity. Of “neutral” features (83), Adam, too, of Aw’s second novel, is of unclassifiable lineage. In making his birthday fall on 17 August, Indonesia’s Independence Day, Aw compels us to conclude that the trajectory charted by this character is that also of his nation. Adam’s impassioned retort to Din that someone with a name like de Willigen “is as Indonesian as you are” (115) is a direct challenge to the immutable lines of diference that the state constructs to enclose and protect the particularisms of the national. Such works open up the repertoires of representation of nationness, signalling the move away from essences and origins to foreground the plural and multiple aspects of national identity construction.

Conclusion

This article has argued that the outcome of cultural globalization in Malaysia cannot be interpreted in unilateral terms. Conceptions of globalization as a top-down phenomenon do not take into account the social, political, and discursive transformations that can be unleashed when the local is brought into dialogue or contestation with the global.

Towards this end, in illustrating the ways in which local social formations can tactically engage with or oppose the homogenizing moves of the national and the global, this article points to several overlapping but also contradictory strands, where the cultural hegemony of the nation-state and its discourses are resisted, even as the primary medium used to reshape the national imaginary is a dominant agent of globalization embraced by the state. It has argued that notions of “homogeneity”, “indigeneity”, “purity”, and “authenticity”, highly charged discourses with respect to globalization, have been vigorously contested by English literary writings, which instead foreground multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference This is not to say that the rise of other social processes associated with English, including the displacement of Malay and the erasure of or disruption to other local symbols, is not or should not be a matter for concern. Rather, the argument here is that Malaysian literature in English performs a valuable cultural role in its use and appropriation of global resources to serve local ends and aspirations.

Particularly salient in this regard is the rejection by English-language literature of the ethno-centric nationalist sensibility propagated by state actors since Independence in 1957. With the advent of globalization discourses into the political realm in the 1990s, official cultural endeavours to legitimize Malay hegemony have been couched in a new language compatible with the state’s agenda to position itself advantageously in the world marketplace. Indeed, as the government made economic development its top priority in the rapidly industrializing 1990s, national symbols have been wrapped in the rhetoric of globalization. The Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur (when completed in 1998 and for six years afterwards, the tallest building in the world) and other such monuments were touted as national icons and positioned within the globally aspirational chant of “Malaysia Boleh!” (“Malaysia Can!”). Such improvised narratives of nation have included former premier Mahathir Mohamad’s announcement in 1991 of the still-circulating national idea of Bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian Race/Nation) and current premier Najib Razak’s endorsement of One Malaysia (or 1Malaysia). On the level of rhetoric at least, both carry a more inclusive conception of the nation than the older cultural templates (such as the National Culture Policy of 1971). Indeed, Bangsa Malaysia, announced in the globalization-conducive atmosphere of impending cultural liberalization, was perceived as an all-encompassing supra-ethnic national identity that could provide a common, unifying basis for Malaysians. The fact that such readings were not explicitly repudiated by the state suggests that the latter was well aware of the profound appeal of a non race-based identity to a multiethnic Malaysian space that was transforming and adapting itself to the changes introduced into society by globalization, modernization, and wider evolutionary shifts. However, a critical reading of Malaysia’s narrative of globalization would suggest that the state’s avowed agenda of creating a Bangsa Malaysia was subsumed under an economic narrative targetted at creating a globally successful and wealthy ethnic Malay business class.

Thus, we are left with the various official narratives of culture still formulated in ways that maintain the race-based organizing logic of the state. It is in relation to this racialized local context that the transethnic representations of the nation in Malaysian literature in English gain in ideological and cultural significance. In this respect, literature in English in Malaysia can be seen to participate in the performance of a “globalization from below”. This is an integral part of local struggles to construct the national through a resistance to the agenda of the nation-state to manage social institutions and cultural practices and ultimately the character and constitution of Malaysian national identity.

For playing a transformational role in the cultural life of the Malaysian nation, English cannot be viewed merely as a global language. In fact, in constituting a “form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibilities” (Appadurai, 1990: 7), English should be acknowledged as a local — a culturally-situated — language. In other words, the use of English, especially in relation to its role in the negotiation of emerging identities, should be seen as a culturally-embedded practice in its own right. This view of English as a Malaysian cultural language generates transformations in the very terms with which contemporary Malaysian society and identity should be thought about and theorized.

This is a controversial view in a country where language remains a highly politicized and ethnicized issue. Despite the fact that it is spoken widely and proficiently (and not only by middle-class, urban, educated groups), and has had long enough of a history to have taken on localized idioms and inflections, English is still perceived solely in terms of its genesis in British colonialism. From this perspective, it cannot rise to being anything other than “the colonizer’s language”. This is despite the fact that English has become so “Malaysianized”, through use, adaptation, appropriation, resistance and reconstruction, that it is considered the first language, if not the “mother tongue”, of a significant portion of a younger generation of Malaysians, including segments of the urban ethnic Malay population. The state’s language policies and outlook, however, in continuing to view English as the linguistic and national “other”, summarily disregard these social transitions as well as the new identity politics and representations that English has made possible.

I do not mean to suggest, however, that globalization is solely or even mainly responsible for enabling “the struggle of the margins to come into representation” (Hall, 1997: 27). What this essay has sought to do is locate globalization as one of the sites that has provided the conditions for the creation of new spaces and contexts, and therein new possibilities and politics, for re-imagining national culture and identity. Indeed, my postcolonial readings of Maniam, Rajendran, and Aw demonstrate the ways in which their works transcend the narrow politics of the nation-state by disrupting the old ontological claims to stability of a pre-constituted Malaysian-ness. By telling the national story “from the bottom up, instead of from the top down” (Hall, 1997: 27), Malaysian literature in English re-imagines the nation as a space of heterogeneities, connectedness, and flows. This reconfigured epistemology of the national carries ramifications for all those making claims of cultural supremacy, indigeneity, and exclusivity of belonging in Malaysia.