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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 relationship between Conrad’s Malay fiction and colonialism is a prominent subject of commentary now, and has been for some time. Most scholars would point to Chinua Achebe’s important article “An Image of Africa” as the initiation into the interest in Conrad and colonialism, but if fact decades previously, Florence Clemens had begun this conversation in her ground-breaking commentary on Conrad’s Malay fiction. At the time Florence Clemens was writing, almost nothing had been written on the Conrad’s colonial world, and for many years her work thus was relatively unknown and relatively difficult to obtain. However, Clemens’ work is significant, and its appearance in Brill’s Conrad Studies series now makes this important study readily available to scholars.
Overcoming Passion examines the passion for race in contemporary Malaysia. Broadly the essays look at the disjunction between the falsity of race as a scientific category and the entrenched belief that race determines one's rightful identity. They probe the ways in which individual minds and institutions of power fail or refuse to recognise and act in accordance with the knowledge that race exists only insofar as its existence is sustained by the believer's belief in it. The contributors draw from a burgeoning but under-examined archive of Malaysia-related social texts, ranging from media and technological discourse, popular culture and literary production to historical writings, produced originally in English, Malay and Mandarin Chinese.