y separately published work icon Journal of Postcolonial Writing periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: Special Focus : Eco-fictions : Emergent Discourses and Nature and the Environment in Postcolonial Literature
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... vol. 55 no. 2 2019 of Journal of Postcolonial Writing est. 2005- Journal of Postcolonial Writing
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Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2019 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Nature in Contemporary Malaysian Life-writings in English, Kavitha Ganesan , single work criticism

'This article investigates the representation of nature in contemporary Malaysian life-writings in English by female writers of Malay, Chinese and Indian ethnic origins. Adibah Amin’s This End of the Rainbow, Christine Ramsay’s Days Gone By and Muthammal Palanisamy’s From Shore to Shore are analysed by contextualizing the use of nature as an element in narrative strategy that indicates a sense of textual commonality. Through an examination of the agency and subjectivity of each protagonist, this article argues that nature is used to forward a homogenizing identity in the Malay nationalist life-writing, and to trace and validate diasporic roots in the Chinese and Indian texts. Despite the nationalist and diasporic attributes of the three texts, which are grounded on the writers’ ethnic differences, the use of nature indicates a common concern and promising future for the development of Malaysian Literature in English.' (Publication abstract)

 (p. 169-181)
“The Waste of the Empire” : Neocolonialism and Environmental Justice in Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”, Begoña Simal-González , single work criticism
'This article interrogates the politics of “waste” in both the environmental and the socio-economic senses of the word, with a special attention to the outsourcing of toxicity and the “wastification” of disposable, residual bodies. Both toxic discourse, as explored by Lawrence Buell and Cynthia Deitering, and environmental justice, in particular Rob Nixon’s elucidation of the representational challenges posed by slow violence, contribute to a specific approach, Waste Theory, used here to analyse “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”, a 1999 short story by Filipino/Australian writer Merlinda Bobis, in which she grapples with the dirty politics of waste. This narrative constitutes a neocolonial allegory particularly amenable to Waste Theory, in that it allows critics to tease out the ways in which toxic environments act in conjunction and collusion with the toxic configurations of power that transform human beings into literal or figurative waste.'

 (Publication abstract)

 
 (p. 209-222)
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