Shawn Wong

Robbie B.H. Goh

Asian diasporas are all too often seen in terms of settlement problems in a host nation, where the focus is on issues of crime, housing, employment, racism and related concerns. The essays in this volume view Asian diasporic movements in the context of globalization and global citizenship, in which multiple cultural allegiances, influences and claims together create complex negotiations of identity.Examining a range of cultural documents through which such negotiations are conducted — literature and other forms of writing, media, popular culture, urban spaces, military inscriptions, and so on — the essays in this volume explore the meanings and experiences involved in the two major Asian diasporic movements, those of South and East Asia.

Cultures, Indentity, Representation

Asian Diasporas

Lisa Lim

Lionel Wee

This volume brings together contributions that explore the increasingly important roles that English plays in Asia, including its contribution to economic growth, national imaginaries and creative writing. These are issues that are political in a broad sense, but the diversity of Asian contexts also means that the social, political and cultural ramifications of the spread of English into Asia will have to be understood in relation to the challenges facing specific societies. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate this diversity by focusing on countries from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. Each country has two contributions devoted to it: one paper provides an overview of the country’s language policy and its positioning of English, and another provides a critical discussion of creative expressions involving the use of English. Taken together, the papers in the volume detail the most recent developments concerning the politics of English in Asia.

South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific

The Politics of English

The essays in this volume deal with the complexities of race in the Asia-Pacific context. Social tensions concerning race and ethnicity continue to pose profound challenges to Asia-Pacific countries in various stages of development and modernisation. Issues such as social justice, identity-formation, marginalisation and alienation, gender and related issues, are inevitably implicated in the racial cultures of Asia, and where Asian diasporic communities develop. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which race-culture is reflected in literature and cultural texts (drama and performance, visual arts, film and television). Included in this volume are essays on Amitav Ghosh, Vivan Sundaram, Li-Young Lee, R. K. Narayan, Ayu Utami, Dewi Lestari, Rex Shelley, Xu Xi, Pico Iyer and others.

Robbie B.H. Goh

Books

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