The Postcolonial Millennium

Mohammad A. Quayum is a full-time researcher and Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, Australia. He taught at universities in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US before returning to his alma mater, Flinders University, in 2020. He has published numerous books and articles in American, Bengali, and Southeast Asian literature. His books on Malaysian anglophone literature include Colonial to Global: Malaysian Women’s Writing in English 1940s-1990s (2003), One Sky, Many Horizons: Studies in Malaysian Literature in English (2014), and Reading Malaysian Literature in English: Ethnicity, Gender, Diaspora, and Nationalism (2021). Grace V.S. Chin is Senior Lecturer in English Language Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia. She specializes in postcolonial Southeast Asian literatures in English and has published journal articles and essays on writers and literary works from Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. She has also published edited and co-edited volumes, the latest of which is Translational Politics in Southeast Asian Literatures: Contesting Race, Gender, and Sexuality (2021).

Introduction—The postcolonial millennium: New directions in Malaysian literature in English 1. China, Malaysia, and millennial diasporic identity in Tash Aw’s The Face and Five Star Billionaire 2. Universalism and the Malaysian anglophone novel: Exploring inequality, migrancy, and class in Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors 3. Transnational re-memorialization in Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day 4. Interracial relations and the post-postcolonial future in Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad 5. Hyphenational poetics in Omar Musa’s Parang and Millefiori 6. On not writing back: Cosmopolitan paradoxes in new diasporic Malaysian writing today 7. The ruins of referentiality: Allegorical realism and traumatic fragments in Scorpion Orchid and The Search 8. Diffractive spaces: An analysis of Malaysian cyberpunk 9. Satire and community in the time of COVID-19: An analysis of Ernest Ng’s Covidball Z