Transnational Negotiations of Memory and Space in New Malaysian Diasporic Writings

Résumé 0

The focal point of this paper is the concept of the transnational and the blurred and fluctuating boundaries of ties with the nation that was once home as depicted in the works of the emerging community of new Malaysian diasporic writers. New Malaysian diasporic writers in the context of this paper are taken to refer to writers who were born in Malaysia and who are now settled elsewhere in the globe, and yet are recognisably transnational in that their writings focus on the older country and memories of family, community and a nation that once was home. Notably this transnational community of writers exists within the intersections of an outsider-insider perspective of the nation and their writings draw largely from recollections that are often rooted in folk memory and most significantly in the stories inherited from family. This paper will present a discussion of the dialectics of this perspective by interspersing concepts of ’fort/da’ (Bhabha), the ’synchronic warehouse’ (Appadurai) and various theories of re-memory. It ultimately argues that memory and material culture undergo various transformative shifts through transnational voyages, multiple passages through immeasurable borders and portals until ultimately the creative space becomes the space where both the voices of the past and the present intersperse, much like the notes from Keat’s darkling thrush rising above the straggling branches of its perch. Within that single space, the writer is both insider and outsider, included yet excluded, with every ordained arrival and departure of migration, emigration or trans-movement.