Fiction And Faction In The Malay World

This book offers a variety of essays and perspectives on some of the foreigners and traders who came to the Malay World and wrote fiction and “faction” (writing that portrays real people or events in a dramatised manner) during their sojourn – regardless of whether they continued to stay in the region, returned to their home country, or migrated to another country. The essays tend to cross generic and disciplinary boundaries as the contributors of this book are drawn from various fields within the arts and humanities, including history, geography, language and literature and translation. All of them, however, deal with colonial texts, the Malay World, or primarily cover the period from the 18th to the 20th century. Including readings of fiction, diaries, vignettes, letters written by traders or colonial officers, the uniqueness of this book lies in the personal, private and/or informal nature of the various documents studied. The encounters of these ‘outsiders’ with the ‘natives’ not only offer fascinating historical insights into the Malay World, but, to a significant degree, vividly express the views and personalities of the writers themselves, as mediated through their assigned commercial and colonial roles.

Taking its cue from feminist-postcolonial studies of women’s writing in the colonial era, this book testifies to the great diversity of such writing. However, it uniquely does this by showing the existence of a richly varied and heterogeneous range of texts not only between man writers and woman writers, but, equally, amongst the women themselves. These are women, moreover, who are writing within the same relatively small region of South East Asia. As Agnes Keith, whose writing forms the focal point of this book, credibly surmises, Borneo remained, even towards the end of the colonial period, a dark and mysterious land to people in the West, largely populated, as they imagined, by tribes of headhunters. It was, therefore, to the lack of knowledge and curiosity of ordinary middle-class people in the West that Keith’s writing, and that of the other woman writers featured in this book, so engagingly responds.

In the series of Local Knowledge publication, this book particularly deals with empowering local knowledge further, towards a more globalized vision. It is an anthology of copious articles that delves deeper into stabilizing the establishment of local knowledge and preservation of archaic knowledge, literature, traditions and culture in the Asia-Pacific region. This book pushes the boundaries of mediocrity by going to great lengths and course in its research to interpret and preserve certain dying knowledge of local cultures and literature. Mostly, the methods used in compiling these local wisdoms and memories is by immortalizing the knowledge though oral account where the gist of the research is transcribed and discussed in the articles presented in this book. This book also highlights the different perspectives of looking at local knowledge that it has subscribed to. This compilation presents how local knowledge of various disciplines is considered in different fields such as local art, political science, business and tourism and traditional folklore. The cosmic approach to looking at local knowledge through these various fields provides a holistic review of local knowledge.

Highlighting the interconnections between Southeast Asia and the world through literature, this book calls for a different reading approach to the literatures of Southeast Asia by using translation as the main conceptual framework in the analyses and interpretation of the texts, languages, and cultures of the following countries: Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, and the Philippines. Through the theme of “translational politics,” the contributors critically examine not only the linguistic properties but also the metaphoric, symbolic, and semiotic meanings, images, and representations that have been translated across societies and cultures through local and global consumption and circulation of literature, (new) media, and other cultural forms. Using translation to unlock and decode multiple, different languages, narratives, histories, and worldviews emerging from Southeast Asian geo-literary contexts, this book builds on current scholarship and offers new approaches to the contestations of race, gender, and sexuality in literature, which often involve the politically charged discourses of identity, language, and representation. At the same time, this book provides new perspectives and future directions in the study of Southeast Asian literatures. Exploring a range of literary and cultural products, including written texts, performance, and cinema, this volume will be a key resource for students and researchers interested in translation and cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and Southeast Asian studies.

Established in 1859, Singapore's Botanic Gardens has served as a park for Singaporeans and visitors, a scientific institution, and a testing ground for tropical plantation crops. Each function has its own story, while the Gardens also fuel an underlying narrative of the juncture of administrative authority and the natural world. Created to help exploit natural resources for the British Empire, the Gardens became contested ground in conflicts involving administrators and scientists that reveal shifting understandings of power, science and nature in Singapore and in Britain. This continued after independence, when the Gardens featured in the "e;greening"e; of the nation-state, and became Singapore's first World Heritage Site. Positioning the Singapore Botanic Gardens alongside the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and gardens in India, Ceylon, Mauritius and the West Indies, this book tells the story of nature's colony-a place where plants were collected, classified and cultivated to change our understanding of the region and world.

How has Singapore's environment and location in a zone of extraordinary biodiversity influenced the economic, political, social, and intellectual history of the island since the early 19th century? What are the antecedents to Singapore's image of itself as a City in a Garden? Grounding the story of Singapore within an understanding of its environment opens the way to an account of the past that is more than a story of trade, immigration, and nation-building. Each of the chapters in this volume focusing on topics ranging from tigers and plantations to trade in exotic animals and the greening of the city, and written by botanists, historians, anthropologists, and naturalists examines how humans have interacted with and understood the natural environment on a small island in Southeast Asia over the past 200 years, and conversely how this environment has influenced humans. Between the chapters are travelers' accounts and primary documents that provide eyewitness descriptions of the events examined in the text. In this regard, Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore provides new insights into the Singaporean past, and reflects much of the diversity, and dynamism, of environmental history globally.