A Malaysian Ecocriticism Reader

Considerations of Nature, Culture, Place and Identities
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-981-99-9468-7
Verlag: Springer Nature Singapore

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 316 g

This collection of essays brings together ecocritical interpretations of Malaysian texts – including fiction, nonfiction, and other media / cultural expressions. It includes original works by environmental activists as well as emerging and established scholars, who collectively analyse various aspects of Malaysian ecological discourse.

The contributors address crucial – and often controversial – topics such as local ecological imaginations, wildlife conservation, overdevelopment, postcolonial ecological identities, biopolitics, nature and sexuality, nature and race, the commodification of nature, nature–culture embodiments and entanglements, human–animal relations, waste and materiality, human and other-than-human agency, toxicity and slow violence, self-representations as well as attitudes towards land, nativity and indigeneity, migrancy and diaspora.
Readers will gain valuable insights into the ways in which environments and ecological relationships are mediated within this national space, while opening up room to theorise beyond its boundaries.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tham, Wai Liang

Yeow, Agnes S. K.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Pädagogik Teildisziplinen der Pädagogik Gesundheitspädagogik, Umweltpädagogik
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Introduction: The biosemiotic turn and Malaysian ecocriti-cism.- Part I: Cultivating multispecies worlds.- Chapter 2: Petikan dari halaman: An ecocritical reading of Lat’s graphic novels and Malay home gardens.- Chapter 3: On love, keepers and confiscated orang-utans.- Chapter 4: K.S. Maniam’s bestiary: Reading animality and identity in selected stories.- Part II: Mediating magical landscapes.- Chapter 5: Imperial enclosure, literary resistance: The case of Ishak Haji Muhammad’s Putera Gunung Tahan (1938).- Chapter 6: Other-than-human: Thinking like the forest gardens.- Chapter 7: An enchanted landscape: Rethinking ‘irrational ideas’ of human relations to nature.- Part III: Encountering other ecologies.- Chapter 8: Trashy tales and tales of Trash (2016): The making of waste in contemporary Malaysian short stories.- Chapter 9: The other Malay: Nature and subversive sexualities in Dina Zaman’s King of the Sea (2012).- Part IV: Defending the tanah air.- Chapter 10: An excerpt from Memoirs of a Malaysian Eco-Activist (2017).- Chapter 11: The eco-hero in Malaysian novels: From solitary figures to group solidarity.

Über Autor(innen)

Dr Agnes S. K. Yeow taught at the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, until her retirement. Her research areas encompassed topics related to the environmental humanities, including climate change literature, postcolonial ecocriticism and migrant ecologies.

Wai Liang Tham has a background in English from his postgraduate studies at Universiti Malaya and is currently affiliated with the research department at New Naratif. His creative and nonfiction works have been published in NANG , PR&TA and the Southeast Asian Review of English.