Part 1

• Breaking the Line: Wong May as test-case for Literary Southeast Asia Ann Ang Nanyang Technological University

  Though calling Singapore home in an interview, Wong May was born in China and left at twenty-two, residing variously in Iowa, Berlin, Grenoble and Dublin. Emerging from the post-independence poetic circle at the University of Malaya, Wong would evolve her own style of signature line-breaks, startling juxtapositions in imagery and a breadth of subject matter ranging from the Vietnam war to Goya’s paintings. First closely associated with the Black Mountain poets, Wong also developed a close friendship with Hilda Morley, a US poet with whom her poetic style is closely associated. Morley’s mentor and namesake was Hilda Doolittle. This, in turn, suggests a possible line of influence between the imagistic ellipsis that characterises H.D.’s Sea Garden (1918) and Wong’s debut A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals (1969).
  How does one read the mobility of a poet like Wong May, winner of Yale’s Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry in 2022, whose style and oeuvre to date also includes translations of Tang dynasty poems? This paper will read Wong’s singular mobility firstly, in terms of her formalistic influences from Morley and the broader Anglo-American modernist milieu, then against various frameworks associated with anglophone writing from Southeast Asia: internationalism, Commonwealth and postcolonial writing, New Literatures in English, and global modernism. By doing so, this paper will discuss the potentialities and constraints of various frameworks associated with anglophone writing from the region, and suggest some further ways we can think about literary traditions in Southeast Asia.

• Oceanic literature and forced displacement Kelly Yin Nga Tse The Education University of Hong Kong

  This paper critically examines the representation of the ocean in the literary works of Vietnamese refugee writers such as Viet Thanh Nguyen and Nam Le. Specifically, it attends to the haunting materiality of the Pacific Ocean as traversed by the boat people of Vietnam in the wake of the war (1955–75). By drawing readerly attention to perilous wet matter in their prose, this paper contends, Vietnamese literary artists seek to rethink the archive of the conflict in Vietnam. In doing so, they argue that an oceanic vantage point is crucial to critiquing American imperialism and Vietnamese nationalism that have co-produced the displaced. Maritime spaces, these writers posit, are also conflict spaces. By engaging with the ocean’s mortal effects on the boat people during their voyage, Vietnamese refugee writing powerfully expands the spatial and temporal parameters of the dark chapter in Asian history.

• Transnational Hauntings: spectrality and weak rootedness in Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad (2014) and The Black Water Sister (2021) Kam Tou Pang University of Macau

  As the Singaporean writer Ng Yi-Sheng evocatively declared in “Spicepunk Manifesto” (2022) that “a specter is haunting Southeast Asia”, this recent rise of contemporary speculative and fantasy fictions (SFF) should not only be read as an anti-colonial counter-west gesture of resurrecting local myths and folklores, but actually allows us to take spectrality seriously, that it is less of an exhausted trope and more of a critical method in theorizing new relationalities and affects in the contemporary Southeast Asia increasingly defined by influx of transnational travelers, sojourners, and returnees. Informed by minor transnationalism (Lionnet and Shih 2005) and queer roots (Hayes 2016), this paper explores what I coined as ‘weak rootedness’ found in the SEA-themed migratory narratives interweaved with ghostly encounters in Spirits Abroad (2014) and The Black Water Sister (2021) by the Malaysia-raised, UK-based writer Zen Cho. The paper contends that specters do not conjure in the transnational/diasporic subject the essentialist ethnic and/or cultural “roots”, but rather facilitate weak rootedness, a set of affective modalities that arises from affinity (be it ancestral, relational, cultural, ethnic) and requires constant reinforcements, which is symptomatic of people’s movements, migrations and mobilities regionally and globally today. As an oxymoron, weak rootedness also refers to a relationality that is subdued and shallow yet invested and visceral, attainable while disposable and circumstantial. Inspired by Sedgwick’s developments on “weak theory” (1997), weak rootedness aims to destabilise the fraught “roots and routes” and to some extent, even offers queer potentialities. Through examining spectrality and weak rootedness in Cho’s transnational writings, this study aspires to envision alternative perspectives on affects and relationalities prominent in contemporary SEA Literatures.

• Embodied and Emplaced Mobilities as Cultural Imaginary in Anglophone Bruneian Literature Hannah M. Y. Ho Universiti Brunei Darussalam

  This paper addresses a place-mobility nexus to offer an emic approach in a literary analysis of an inextricable intersection of place and mobility, which share a co-constitutive relationship. In challenging the conventional idea of place (or rootedness) as antithetical to mobility (or movement), it critically examines mobility as a situated process that reconfigures place, which has been commonly conceived as a fixed, stable, and sedentary locale and locality. Along this line, mobility is refigured in place to denote the contingent, provisional, and emergent features of place across time. Within the specific context of Brunei Darussalam, Bruneians’ inhabitation of and movements across physical settings of land and water signal locales for exploring their familial and cultural identities. Noel B. Salazar’s conceptualization of embodied and emplaced mobilities is brought to bear on a reading of contemporary Anglophone Bruneian literatures, including Kathrina Mohd Daud’s novel entitled The Fisherman King (2020) and Tina Afiqah’s The Bubble Princess and the Stone Heart (2021). These novels rely heavily on Malay folklore and delineate cultural identities through imagined spaces of localised practices and processes of mobilities across both terrestrial and non-terrestrial places associated with ancient and present-day Brunei Darussalam. While unpacking instances of emplaced mobilities that are personified in Bruneian characters and exemplified in familiar Bruneian physical settings within these works by two Bruneian authors, an emic literary approach is adopted to analyze the critical and creative purchase of mobilities as a significant trope for inscribing a local cultural imaginary. As products of the cultural imagination, these texts (re)imagine an embodied and emplaced sense of local cultural mobilities too. Hence, in employing the place-mobility nexus as an operative framework, Anglophone Bruneian literatures offer a critique of cultural identity formation that is shaped by sociocultural locales and embedded localities that are ultimately fluid, adaptable, and mobile.

Part 2

• Ungrounding Singapore Literature: Exploring Archipelagic Thinking and Oceanic Epistemologies in Isa Kamari’s Rawa and Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation Angelia Poon National Institute of Education

  For postcolonial nations like Singapore and many others, the historical period of decolonization and nation-building typically brings to mind images of construction and building on terra firma, whether this be of public housing, large-scale industries or key infrastructure. Such images mobilize particular ways of conceiving of space, time, mobility and movement, ultimately privileging land-based epistemologies. This paper seeks to plot an alternative trajectory in Singapore literary and cultural criticism by considering the meaning-making potential of the sea and other waterways in the island city-state’s narratives. Drawing theoretical inspiration from Edouard Glissant’s “archipelagic imagination”, particularly as the concept has been discussed and applied to the Sinophone Nanyang and the Nusantara or Malay World, I explore how archipelagic thinking and oceanic epistemologies may serve to interrogate the territorial basis of colonialism and nationalism as well as the borders of knowledge associated with these ideological and discursive formations. I examine two novels—Isa Kamari’s Rawa, originally written in Malay, and Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation. Rawa depicts the world of the Orang Seletar, one of the indigenous groups in Singapore displaced by the nation-state’s urban development when they lost navigational access to the waterways between Singapore and Johor that sustained their traditional way of life. The Great Reclamation narrates the story of Boon, a young boy from a fishing family who possesses a fantastical ability to discover islands. This initially proves beneficial to his local community but ultimately leads to grief and tragedy when he grows up and joins the postcolonial government. Relying on the sea and littoral place-making for affective, thematic and symbolic significance, both novels challenge the imagined community of Singapore, ‘the little red dot’, by (re)awakening memories, uncovering past mobilities, and forging other ways of knowing and connecting.

• From the West to Burma: Representation of Modern Burmese Women in Kyi Aye’s Maung, Ko Ko and Myananda Tongchen Hou SOAS

  Colonial Burma was regarded by John S. Furnivall as a plural society in which ethnically and socioeconomically diverse groups, including Europeans, Indians, Chinese, and Burmese, coexisted but remained segregated. The Burmese people lagged behind and were marginalized compared to Europeans, Indians, and Chinese, thereby excluded from the modernization process. Each group attempted to establish various symbols in pursuit of a fixed identity. However, I argue that cultural identity is not simple or ironclad but fluid and superimposed.
  This paper focuses primarily on the literary work of the best-known Burmese modern female author Kyi Aye (1929-2016), who had rich experience of working, travelling and living abroad. Most of her works span from the 1950s to the 1990s and are often characterised by readers as ‘brave (????????)’, ‘modern (?????????)’ and ‘ahead of their time (???????????????)’. Among the writers of her period, she was the most criticised because she challenged social norms. One of the assumptions to explain the novelty and uniqueness of her writings is her overseas experience and multilingual readings. Multilingual writers and intellectuals who have access to foreign literature and overseas education act as bridges in between Westerners and Burmese. Kyi Aye functions as a cultural mediator whose works represent the mobility of ideas. I argue that by interrogating representations of Burmese modern women, Kyi Aye breaks down the binary division of ‘being Burmese’ and ‘being Western’ while simultaneously crossing the conceptual boundary of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. In this paper I refer to Kyi Aye’s famous novel titled Maung, Ko Ko and Myananda (?????????????????????) (1970) as a case study. Seemingly close to Kyi Aye’s own life experience, the novel Maung, Ko Ko and Myananda portrays a Burmese woman who lives in European countries for years and how her family life develops and her attitudes towards life change after travelling. To explore how fluidity of identity and mobility of ideas are unfolded by Kyi Aye, this novel is analysed from two perspectives. The first is about how images of ‘modern women’ are typically portrayed through reactions from surrounding Burmese people. The hallmarks of modern Burmese women are closely intertwined with Western aesthetic and consumer culture, which is demonstrated by the evaluation of Myananda’s appearance and other women’s attitudes. The flirting inclination of the surrounding males towards Myananda after she comes back from Europe demonstrates a close connection between Western vibes and sexual allure. Secondly, after residing in Europe, Myananda’s perspective on life and family undergoes significant changes, as she seeks to find where she belongs to and who she really is. As an in-betweener, she keeps looking for a balance between tradition and modernity. Part of her choses to break away from traditional frameworks, rebelliously challenging the roles her family expect her to fulfil. Another part of her spiritual life opts to return to tradition - embracing Buddhism.
  On the surface, the protagonist appears to belong to the Westernized elite of Burma, but a qualitative shift has occurred within her. The concepts of “being Burmese” and “being Westerner,” “tradition” and “modernity,” blend together in her consciousness. It is difficult to categorize her solely within any one culture or group. The writer endeavours, from the perspective of a complex female character, to break down the binary opposition between indigenous and foreign, and strives to shape a multidimensional, integrated image of modern womanhood.

• Emerging relations, forming nations: Transnational ideological-spatial (im)mobile formations in the life-writing of Shamsiah Fakeh and Aishah Ghani Alicia Izharuddin National University of Singapore

  This paper considers the formative role of overseas girls’ education, travel, and exile in early nationalist politics as explicated in the life-writing of two pioneering Malay female nationalist leaders, Shamsiah Fakeh and Aishah Ghani. The two leaders are strikingly similar in their early trajectory as young women; born a year apart, they gained an education at the famed Arab-medium Islamic girls’ school in Padang Panjang, Western Sumatra, in the 1930s. In the 1940s, during the tumultuous post-war years after Japanese and British occupation, the women became formidable political leaders; Aishah aligned with right-wing, pro-British nationalism, Shamsiah with left-wing pro-Chinese communism. Their diverging ideological alignments found Aishah travelling to London to pursue journalism and Shamsiah in exile in China for a decade, barred from returning to Malaysia until 1989 for her strident communist sympathies. Both women also wrote their own memoirs as personal-public historical record. These politically-dense moments in overseas travel captured in their memoirs have been formative to the rise of their political-gendered-religious identity, signalling what can be argued to be the global ‘transformation of nation through mobilities’ (Hannam et al 2006) and immobility. Equally important are the places of immobility and exile or long-term ‘stopping places’, evoking Urry’s mobility/moorings dialectic, that consolidated political identity and the nation-state. Building on these lines of argument, this paper reflects on the ideological-spatial (im)mobile formations of Indonesia, China, and Britain in the lives of Malay women political leaders, and transnational networks as the maps of gendered life course.

• Climate Migration and Ecological Futures in Southeast Asia via Ng Yi-Sheng’s ‘SIN’ and Vida Cruz-Borja’s ‘In the Shadow of the Typhoon’ Zhui Ning Chang Birkbeck, University of London

  In recent years, climate change and the Anthropocene have emerged as dominant themes in Anglophone speculative fiction and, correspondingly, speculative fiction studies (Adeline Johns-Putra). However, much of this literature presumes a collective humanity in opposition to nature, imposing a universalizing politics of human agency that fails to acknowledge the unequal material conditions and conflicting ideologies that underpin imagined ecological futures across the world (Goutam Karmakar, Somasree Sarkar, Mustafa Zeki Ç?rakl?). Given the underrepresentation of Southeast Asian speculative fictions at an international level and that Southeast Asia as a region is at high risk of the consequences of global heating, this paper examines Ng Yi-Sheng’s ‘SIN’ (Singapore) and Vida Cruz-Borja’s ‘In the Shadow of the Typhoon’ (the Philippines) as speculative narratives of displacement and climate migration, arguing for the necessity of transnational and intraregional responses to the present climate crisis. Building on Rebecca Duncan’s critique of Anthropocene coloniality, I first consider Ng’s short story in its depiction of alien arrivals—coded as climate refugees—and their reception in Singapore, discussing the uneven distribution of climate vulnerability across Southeast Asia and Singapore’s policies on the environment and on migrant communities. Then, within the context of archipelagic and littoral narratives, I turn to Cruz-Borja’s depiction of a flooded post-apocalyptic world, exploring their immersive linguistic elements and use of the newspaper format to illustrate the contrasting impact of climate migration on human and supernatural communities. The twin visions of climate mobility and survival in these texts undermine the notion of individual nations safeguarded from wider socioecological decimation, exposing the hyper-capitalist and neocolonial ideologies that underpin such metanarratives and urging solidarity across borders in the era of climate crisis.

• Ink and Exodus: Mapping Climate Migration Through Philippine Literature Marie Aubrey Villaceran University of the Philippines

  The World Risk Index has consistently ranked the Philippines as one of the top 3 most vulnerable countries when it comes to exposure to disasters and its societal capacity to respond to them. As the country grapples with the increasing impacts of climate change, migration may prove a significant coping mechanism for affected individuals and social groups. This research seeks to examine how selected texts portray the processes involved in the intersection between climate change and migration. How does Philippine literature engage with the climate crisis and migration, reflecting the country’s socio-political and environmental realities? The research seeks to contextualize these literary representations within larger social and political concerns, such as issues of environmental justice, globalization, and colonial legacies to highlight the phenomena, but also question the much-celebrated Filipino culture of “resilience” that removes accountability from local, national, and global institutions and perpetuates a cycle of systemic neglect, exploitation, and marginalization.

Abstract