The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back ― Gender, Identity and Nation in the Literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines

This collection of essays examines how Southeast Asian women writers engage with the grand narratives of nationalism and the modern nation-state by exploring the representations of gender, identity and nation in the postcolonial literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Bringing to light the selected works of overlooked local women writers and providing new analyses of those produced by internationally-known women authors and artists, the essays situate regional literary developments within historicized geopolitical landscapes to offer incisive analyses and readings on how women and the feminine are imagined, represented, and positioned in relation to the Southeast Asian nation.The book, which features both cross-country comparative analyses and country-specific investigations, also considers the ideas of the nation and the state by investigating related ideologies, rhetoric, apparatuses, and discourses, and the ways in which they affect women’s bodies, subjectivities, and lived realities in both historical and contemporary Southeast Asian contexts. By considering how these literary expressions critique, contest, or are complicit in nationalist projects and state-mandated agendas, the collection contributes to the overall regional and comparative discourses on gender, identity and nation in Southeast Asian studies.

Dr Grace V. S. Chin is a senior lecturer in the English Language and Literature Studies programme at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. Previously, she taught English Literature at Universiti Brunei Darussalam and The University of Hong Kong. In 2016, she was awarded senior fellowship by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian & Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, The Netherlands. Her areas of interest include the literatures of postcolonial Southeast Asia and Asian women’s writings, with focus on race and gender in contemporary societies and diasporas. Her articles have appeared in refereed journals such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, World Englishes, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, and The Journal of International Women’s Studies, as well as in books published by Springer, John Benjamins and Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Dr Kathrina Mohd Daud is currently a lecturer in the English Studies programme at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, with a joint appointment in the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Centre for Islamic Studies and the Institute of Asian Studies. She has been a US State Department Scholar at the University of Louisville, Kentucky (2012), a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (2013), and a Visiting Fellow at the Southeast Asian Centre at the University of Washington (2014). She works at the intersections of Islam in literature, popular fiction and Asian literature, with a particular focus on Bruneian literature.