Fictive Memorialisation : Reading the Decolonial Anglophone in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines

Fictive Memorialisation discusses post-millennial Anglophone literature from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore to argue that Southeast Asian writers use literary English fictionally to contest racialized nation-states and transnational publishing circuits.

More than half a century after political independence, ethnic and linguistic belonging in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore---societies marked by multiple and overlapping colonialisms---continues to be racialized. Within these contexts, post-millennial anglophone writing emerges in tension with state projects of linguistic and cultural governance, alongside longer indigenous literary traditions shaped by nativist claims to decoloniality. When Southeast Asian writers employ literary English, they draw on the charged affordances of the anglophone toward reflexivity and relationality, situated within the long postcolonial histories specific to each location.Publishing in the post-millennium has also rendered anglophone Southeast Asian authors newly visible on a transnational Anglo-American literary circuit. In response to these conditions, Fictive Memorialisation advances an argument about the decolonial anglophone, suggesting that literary works offer aesthetic interventions into the racial and linguistic capitalisms of the nation-state in a transnational moment, even as they continue to draw on the anglophone as a symbolic and material circuit.Ann Ang develops the organizing concept of fictive memorialisation to account for how contemporary writing responds to the relatively shorter duration of anglophone literary traditions in Southeast Asia grounded in colonial histories. its ejection from indigenous literary traditions and decolonial claims grounded in nativism, and sociocultural role in the immediate post-independence years as both the language of a postcolonial elite and of culturally or racially hybrid minorities. Taken together, these conditions imply that Southeast Asian anglophone writing must fictionalize its epistemic claims when countering post imperialisms in their respective locations. Across all three literary scenes, Fictive Memorialisation shows how fictionality in the post-millennial moment becomes a source of agency, connecting literary diegeses with extradiegetic archives to re-temporalise a decolonial relationship with history.