Siloed Literary, Linguistic, and Scholarly Traditions

The fragmentation of Malaysia’s literary fields is deeply entrenched in the state’s nation-building and language policies, which are underpinned by Malay-hegemonic governance and political power structures. These divisions are further reinforced by constitutional provisions alongside state-driven economic and sociocultural programmes. The National Language Acts of 1963 and 1967 mandated Malay (Bahasa Malaysia) as the sole national language as well as the official language of government, law, administration, and education. The other major languages of Chinese and Tamil, dismissed as “unrooted” in the nation’s “soil,”Footnote ³ were relegated to vernacular and “non-official” spheres. Such autochthonous narratives that bind historical continuity and cultural belonging exclusively to Malay identity serve to consolidate Malay linguistic dominance while simultaneously marginalizing non-Malay languages and asserting a cultural supremacy that permeates national policy.

Within this state-driven ethnolinguistic classificatory framework, the concepts of the “Sinophone” and “Anglophone” in Malaysian literary discourse become inextricably linked to the hierarchical structure that elevates Malay as the sole national language while systematically marginalizing others. In this context, only Malay-language writings receive official recognition as “national literature”, whereas works in English, Chinese, and Tamil are assigned the category of “sectional literature”. This classification effectively excludes these literatures from the national literary canon, limiting their visibility and critical engagement.

Consequently, non-Malay literatures—despite their integral symbolic and practical roles in shaping Malaysia’s multiethnic identity—are confined to the cultural periphery. They remain marginalised even though they engage deeply with national themes, sociopolitical critique, and the complex realities of Malaysian society. This classification not only diminishes the significance of these literatures but also perpetuates hierarchical structures that privilege monolingualism, undermining Malaysia’s rich linguistic and cultural diversity.

Building on how these institutional frameworks and state policies privilege Malay while marginalizing other languages, it becomes clear that language in Malaysia functions not merely as a means of communication but as a potent symbol deeply intertwined with ethnic identities. As a result, such policies and discourses have led to the ethnicisation of languages in Malaysia, where language operates as a tool to demarcate and distinguish one ethnic community from another. For example, the Malay language is closely associated with the political apparatus of the ruling elite and civil service, domains predominantly controlled by ethnic Malays. In contrast, Chinese languages—including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, and Hakka—are deeply linked with the ethnic Chinese community and commercial contexts, while Tamil serves not only as a linguistic marker of the ethnic Indian community but also as a signifier of Indian labour identity. English, by comparison, is relatively detached from any singular ethnic affiliation and generally regarded as the language of the private and corporate sectors. Nevertheless, it remains framed as the “language of the coloniser,” a perception especially entrenched among Malay ethnopolitical and nationalist groups. This association extends to Malaysian literature in English and persists despite the efforts of authors to forge English into a distinctly Malaysian vernacular that actively contests and subverts its colonial legacy.

This prevailing perception obscures the crucial significance of English as a medium on the ground that transcends ethnic—and increasingly, class—boundaries, fostering the formation of new political communities within both national and global frameworks. What is often overlooked, despite English’s deep integration into Malaysia’s multicultural society and everyday languaging practices, is its cultural currency as an acculturated—or Malaysian—language. Although introduced during British colonial rule, English has over time evolved into a localised vernacular that incorporates vocabulary, syntax, speech patterns, and idiomatic expressions from Malay and other local languages, thus functioning as a transracial marker of Malaysian identity (Plat and Weber Reference Platt and Weber1980; Rahim Reference Rahim2006; Tan Reference Tan2013). For these reasons, English occupies a contested and politically charged space within Malaysia’s complex postcolonial landscape.

The National Culture Policy (NCP) of 1971, introduced in response to the civil disturbances of 13 May 1969, further reinforced the privileged status of Malay while marginalizing non-Malay languages and cultures. Marked by violent conflict primarily between Malay and Chinese communities, the riots were a watershed moment in Malaysian history, erupting in Kuala Lumpur following the significant electoral gains made by the non-communal opposition party, Gerakan, in the general election on 10 May1969. They exposed deep political fractures and ethnic tensions rooted in Malaysia’s colonial legacies, and triggered transformative socioeconomic and cultural policies. The NCP entrenched Malay dominance by elevating Malay culture—defined through a narrow and hegemonic interpretation of “Malayness”—as the foundation of “national culture,” incorporating elements of other traditions only selectively and when deemed “suitable.” Footnote ⁴

These policies, typically justified as measures to promote national unity and identity, have instead created parallel linguistic and ethnic ecosystems that reflect and intensify Malaysia’s compartmentalised and fragmented sociopolitical landscape. Consequently, local scholarship on Malaysian Chinese, Tamil, Malay, and English literatures rarely crosses disciplinary and linguistic boundaries—a direct result of state policies that ethnicise languages and institutionalise the segregation of literary traditions. This segmentation has resulted in a striking paucity of comparative or cross-cultural research by Malaysian scholars across the country’s diverse linguistic and literary cultures—including English, Chinese, Tamil, Malay, Iban, Kadazandusun, Indigenous, and others.Footnote ⁵

For example, Sinophone and Malaysian Tamil literatures remain largely absent from English-language Malaysian scholarship. Anglophone Malaysian texts are typically analyzed either in relation to other Anglophone Malaysian works or positioned within diasporic, multicultural, or world literature frameworks that connect them to global Anglophone texts, rather than engaging with their Sinophone and Tamil counterparts. Paradoxically, even Malaysian scholars committed to postcolonial critique often operate within nation-bound paradigms of literary and cultural production. Although their interpretive frameworks challenge hegemonic notions of the “national” by emphasizing cultural heterogeneity, their predominantly monolingual methodologies inadvertently replicate the state’s ethnolinguistic logic, reinforcing the very boundaries they seek to transcend. This fragmented scholarly landscape limits opportunities for a more integrated understanding of Malaysia’s complex multilingual literary field.

This pattern among Malaysian scholars resonates with Andrew Hock Soon Ng’s concept of “authorial insularity” in Malaysian literature, where writers assert racial exclusivity as a deliberate strategy to resist state-sanctioned racialisation (Ng Reference Ng2018a: 78). Ng’s concept emphasises how individual authors employ such exclusivity as a form of creative resistance within their literary works. I, however, propose a reframing of “insularity” to describe a broader disciplinary practice among Malaysian scholars—what I term “scholarly insularity”—which is rooted in institutional and state-imposed boundaries that confine Malaysian literature and its study within monolingual or ethnolinguistic silos. Unlike Ng’s focus on individual authors’ strategic racial positioning to challenge political and social pressures linked to racialised identities, my concept highlights how these scholarly conventions and practices impede productive exchange and critical dialogue across linguistic divides, thereby undermining broader conversations about shared identity within the nation’s cultural space. Addressing this insularity in Malaysian literary scholarship is thus crucial for fostering more inclusive and dialogic modes of literary criticism in Malaysia.

Extending this analysis of institutionalised linguistic separation, Malaysia’s ethnolinguistically segregated literary fields—where Malay, English, Chinese, and Tamil literatures remain isolated from one another—are deeply rooted in colonial legacies of hierarchy and stratification. During British colonial rule, the educational system was deliberately structured to maintain ethnic and linguistic divisions, reinforcing social hierarchies by providing separate and unequal educational pathways for different communities. This segregation entrenched language politics that privileged English while marginalizing Malay, Chinese and Tamil languages (Abdullah and Kumar 1990; Santhiram and Tan Reference Santhiram, Tan, Malakolunthu and Rengasamy2017).

This historical context aligns closely with Gauri Viswanathan’s critical examination of colonial rule in Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India (Reference Viswanathan1989). Viswanathan argues that English literary education in colonial India was not simply an educational or cultural enterprise but a deliberate instrument of colonial governance, designed to mask systemic exploitation under the rhetoric of moral and intellectual upliftment. Similarly, in Malaysia, colonial education policies employed English literature and language as tools to assert control and reproduce colonial hierarchies, sidelining local languages and literatures.

This entrenched linguistic and ethnic segregation, deeply rooted in Malaysia’s colonial educational policies, continues to shape the nation’s postcolonial landscape. Malay-medium national schools exist alongside Chinese and Tamil vernacular schools, perpetuating linguistic and ethnic divides and institutionalizing separation from an early age. In this context, education and language function not merely as tools for knowledge transmission but as strategic mechanisms for shaping identities, regulating interethnic relations, and maintaining dominant power structures through systemic segregation and selective inclusion. This dynamic exemplifies the broader postcolonial legacy where education is deeply implicated in the governance of ethnicity and political power, with ongoing implications for national unity and multicultural coexistence.

Academic institutions in Malaysia similarly reinforce linguistic divides and perpetuate “scholarly insularity” by compartmentalizing Malaysian literature along language lines. Mirroring colonial-era practices in India, the disciplinary structures in Malaysia—including language-specific literature departments, curriculum designs, national language policies, institutional silos, research funding priorities, and scholarly publishing ecosystems—are far from neutral categorisations; they are political acts that sustain cultural hegemony. Beyond these explicit policies and structures, the broader academic culture itself further reproduces and naturalises linguistic compartmentalisation as a form of cultural and epistemic control, embedding these divisions deeply within disciplinary and scholarly practice. The classification of “Malay,” “English,” “Chinese,” and “Tamil” literatures as separate fields of study does not reflect ahistorical or apolitical distinctions; rather, it perpetuates colonial taxonomies of naming and knowing. These categories, institutionalised through protocols that consolidated colonial power relations, continue to be upheld and reproduced by postcolonial state policies and academic hiring practices, including appointments to university leadership positions influenced more by “race” than by merit, thereby sustaining racialised as well as linguistic segregation within Malaysia’s academic environment.

Building on the foregoing discussion of the institutional dynamics of linguistic compartmentalisation and their role in maintaining cultural hierarchies, it is important to recognise how such classification systems influence literary methodologies. In particular, the categorisation of literary works inevitably shapes the interpretative frameworks and discursive possibilities available to scholars. For example, Viswanathan, building on her critique of English studies as a colonial instrument, expands this analysis by revealing the colonial modalities embedded in the disciplinary formation of English literature in India. She argues that “English literature” is not a natural or pre-existing category but rather a construct shaped through institutional protocols designed to serve colonial objectives of control and cultural domination (Viswanathan Reference Viswanathan2000). Echoing this, Rebecca Walcowitz elaborates: “‘English literature’ names a mode of analysis and a collection of works as well as the way that modes of analysis establish collections. In fact, she [Viswanathan] suggests, there is no ‘English literature’ before institutionalization; only with disciplinary protocols do cultural products become a field” (Walcowitz Reference Walcowitz2006: 527, referring to Viswanathan Reference Viswanathan2000: 20).

In Malaysia, the institutional classification systems discussed earlier manifest in disciplinary and scholarly practices, with racialised segregation channelling research and public discourse into isolated trajectories, effectively curtailing cross-cultural engagement and dialogue. Consequently, this compartmentalisation not only limits comparative inquiry but also reinforces the very hierarchies and binary oppositions that these literatures might otherwise challenge, thereby constraining the emancipatory potential of Malaysian literary studies.

Extending beyond academic and literary institutions, this logic of compartmentalisation and fixation on difference is deeply embedded in Malaysia’s official narratives of multiculturalism, which are embodied in and circulated through cultural campaigns and public representations. This is powerfully illustrated in the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture’s iconic advertising campaign, “Malaysia, Truly Asia.” The campaign’s screen and print advertisements feature four women in traditional attire: “the Malay” in baju kurung, “the Chinese” in cheongsam, “the Indian” in sari, and “the East Malaysian” in ceremonial costume and headdress. This state-sanctioned representation of ethnic diversity for global consumption commodifies Malaysia’s lived, dynamic, and everyday entanglements into a spectacle of separate, bounded racial groups. Each community becomes legible only as a neatly circumscribed cultural box—visible, consumable, and ultimately separable.

This ostensible celebration of multicultural authenticity functions as an instance of racialisation as a signifying practice, shaped by ongoing colonial governmentality through processes of cultural segmentation. Yet, amidst this hegemonic narrative, alternative imaginaries of multiculturalism continue to emerge from grassroots cultural practices, artistic expressions, and relational everyday interactions that challenge and resist the state’s regulating framework. However, rather than emphasizing these dialogic, people-led encounters across difference and the emancipatory potential of a genuinely diverse public culture, the state’s hegemonic narrative of “multiracialism” reproduces a depoliticised and decontextualised multiculturalism that masks entrenched inequalities and perpetuates power hierarchies embedded in “race” and cultural citizenship.

Building on this preceding critique of Malaysia’s fixed, hierarchical multiracial framework—contrasted with alternative imaginaries on the ground where difference is relational, evolving, and generative—and my earlier engagement with Viswanathan’s insight into colonial education as a tool of cultural hegemony, this analysis can be extended beyond Malaysia to encompass broader colonial legacies that continue to shape cultural imaginaries and power structures across Southeast Asia.

A salient example of the colonial legacies that have shaped racial and cultural imaginaries is the historical construction of the Nanyang. Traditionally viewed by imperial China as a marginal realm of “southern barbarians” (Bernards Reference Bernards2016: 30), the Nanyang was significantly reconfigured during the colonial period into an economic and cultural zone defined by migration, trade, and competing imperial interests. British colonial administrators played a pivotal role in shaping this Nanyang imaginary, positioning Southeast Asia as a dynamic nexus of global commerce, while simultaneously imposing racialised labour hierarchies that categorised Chinese migrants as economic intermediaries. These colonial interventions transformed not only the material conditions but also the cultural imagination of the Nanyang — both as an exotic periphery to imperial centres such as China and Britain, and as a vibrant site of cultural exchange (Bernards 2013).

The enduring influence of these colonial legacies—structuring both cultural imaginaries and linguistic hierarchies—remains evident in Malaysia’s contemporary language politics and the continuing divisions that characterise its diverse literary traditions. This intertwined history of economic imperatives, racialised labour control, and cultural representation continues to shape how identities are constructed and contested today, highlighting the necessity of situating Malaysia’s postcolonial multiculturalism—and its Sinophone and Anglophone literary traditions—within a broader, transregional colonial framework to fully understand their complexities.

The Politics of Literary Translation

One significant outcome of Malaysia’s colonial legacies, official language policies, and entrenched ethnic divisions is the marked scarcity of translingual literary production. These linguistic boundaries—deeply rooted in colonial education frameworks and reinforced by post-independence nation-building policies—have compartmentalised literary communities along ethnolinguistic lines, thus severely limiting opportunities for cross-cultural translation and dialogue. Yet, this was not always the case. As scholar and translator Show Ying Xin observes, translation flourished in Malaya during the immediate post-independence period (1957-1960s), when diverse linguistic and cultural groups actively engaged in literary exchange. Show contends that translation was not merely framed as a literary task but as a deliberate cultural policy: community leaders and intellectuals of the time viewed translation and multilingual publishing as essential to fostering cultural cohesion and national unity, while simultaneously respecting linguistic diversity (Show Reference Show2021).

Show highlights academics at institutions like Nanyang University who “straddled the Chinese and Malay cultural communities” and consciously bypassed English as an intermediary language in order to reinforce “intra-national” connections. Other key initiatives were led by bilingual scholars such as Chong Fah Hing, who translated Malay poetry into Chinese and Mahua poetry into Malay. These translation projects facilitated direct exchanges across ethnolinguistic boundaries, embodying a proactive vision of nation-building grounded in intercultural dialogue and solidarity (Show Reference Show2021).

Despite these early and hopeful initiatives, the NCP of 1971, which affirmed the primacy of the Malay language, effectively stifled the vibrant “intra-national” projects of this period and halted the momentum for translingual dialogue. Furthermore, by defining national belonging through assimilation into a narrowly conceived Malay culture, the NCP institutionalised exclusionary and bureaucratic definitions of “national culture” and “national literature.” It not only marginalised non-Malay languages but also delegitimised their literatures as “sectional,” actively discouraging translation efforts between Malay, Mahua, and other Malaysian literary traditions. Consequently, by the mid-1970s, the dynamic period of multilingual literary translation and exchange had largely dissipated, confining Malaysian literature within separate monolingual spheres.

The scarcity of locally driven translations reflects broader systemic challenges rooted in the material conditions of literary production in Malaysia. The publishing industry, predominantly controlled by Malay-language presses, offers limited opportunities for non-Malay writers to publish their works or secure translations. Furthermore, state-controlled agencies responsible for funding literary projects and awarding literary prizes often prioritise Malay-language initiatives, further sidelining non-Malay literatures. Although there are the occasional translations of English, Chinese, and Tamil writings into Malay, these efforts remain sporadic and are largely driven by individual rather than institutional initiatives.Footnote ⁶ The lack of sustained institutional support limits the visibility of Anglophone and Sinophone writers within Malaysia’s national literary landscape, perpetuating linguistic silos that hinder meaningful cross-cultural exchange. This material reality underscores how state policies and institutional frameworks not only shape literary production but also influence the circulation of literature, reinforcing divisions that obscure the interconnectedness of Malaysia’s diverse multilingual literary traditions.

Building on the discussion of systemic barriers in Malaysia’s literary landscape, it is important to recognise that the institutional neglect of Mahua literature has led to an increasing reliance on foreign academic presses, markets, and literary circuits for its translation and dissemination. While this shift has broadened the global reach of Mahua literature, it has also complicated its positioning within global literary frameworks. For instance, Ho Sok Fong’s second collection of stories gained significant international recognition through its English translation, Lake Like a Mirror (translated by Natascha Bruce), published by Granta in the United Kingdom (2019) and Two Lines Press in the United States (2020). Similarly, Li Zi Shu’s 2010 novel, The Age of Goodbyes, was translated into English by YZ Chin and published by Feminist Press in the United States in 2022, earning the author international exposure and widespread critical acclaim.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, the works of prominent Mahua writer Ng Kim Chew only became accessible to an English-language readership through the translation of selected short stories in Slow Boat to China and Other Stories (Reference Ng2016, translated by Carlos Rojas), published by a foreign academic institution. This dependence on overseas presses underscores the ongoing challenges Mahua writers face in securing institutional support within Malaysia.

The translation of Mahua writings by foreign institutions also raises crucial questions about literary sovereignty and the politics of representation. Ng’s Slow Boat to China, published under Columbia University Press’s “Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan” series, is framed as “literature from Taiwan”, rather than Malaysia. This series similarly features works by other diasporic Malaysian Sinophone writers, such as Li Yun-Ping’s Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles (2003) and Chang Kuei-Hsing’s My South Seas Sleeping Beauty: A Tale of Memory and Longing (2007), both of which are likewise repositioned as literature from Taiwan.

This development raises a troubling dynamic in which Mahua literature, marginalised within its home context, gains recognition and circulation primarily through foreign or international channels, but at the cost of being reclassified within other national or regional literary traditions. The geopolitical relabelling of Malaysian works as “literature from Taiwan” exposes the power asymmetries embedded within global literary circuits and markets. While the term “literature from Taiwan” may ostensibly denote works produced in Taiwan, this framing obscures the Malaysian origins and cultural affiliations of the authors. At the same time, it reinforces Taiwan’s globally recognised status as a key hub for Sinophone literary production and intellectual exchange outside of mainland China, even as it perpetuates the ongoing marginalisation of Mahua literature within the broader Sinosphere.

Moreover, the repositioning of Mahua literature under the rubric of “literature from Taiwan” not only diminishes the visibility and agency of Malaysian authors but also risks effacing the “diasporic local” specificities and nuanced cultural articulations integral to Mahua expression. When filtered through foreign translation protocols that lack translators who are deeply attuned to locally embedded complexities, the distinctive vernacular, sociocultural references, and layered identities central to Mahua literary culture risk being flattened into a homogenised “Chineseness.” Furthermore, such language “transactions” are often mediated by global publishing markets that prioritise accessibility and broad appeal over contextual sensitivity, risking the flattening of local particularities to the extent that they become detached from their rootedness in Malaysia’s distinctive historical, geographical, ecological, and diasporic local specificities.Footnote ⁸ It is important to recognise that such linguistic standardisation does not necessarily occur consciously or with intent to diminish; despite the efforts of well-meaning translators striving for fidelity and contextual sensitivity, the plurilingual complexities embedded within Mahua literature can be difficult to fully convey across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Reflecting on her own experience of translating Alfian Sa’at’s Malay Sketches (2012) into Chinese for publication in Taiwan, Show Ying Xin highlights the challenges of navigating diverse linguistic codes, cultural nuances, and socio-political contexts that shape meaning. She argues that these challenges underscore the critical need for translators to develop deep “translation cognition”—an understanding of the “pulse of the times” and the local communities’ needs—in order to avoid reducing rich, localised narratives, especially from plurilingual contexts like Malaysia and Singapore, into diluted or sanitised representations within the broader Sinophone framework (Show Reference Show2021).

This dynamic mirrors the epistemic violence wrought by global and national hegemonies—violence that Mahua literary expression actively resists by highlighting its rich heterogeneity and relationality. Rather than acknowledging these relational and dynamic realities, such processes of linguistic homogenisation risk commodifying literary languages into discrete, isolated cultural spheres. This epistemic erasure parallels the compartmentalisation inherent in Malaysia’s “Malaysia, Truly Asia” tourism campaign, which, as noted earlier, markets “Chineseness” as a singular, bounded category, distinct from and segmented against other racialised identities such as “Malayness” and “Indianness”. This reductive framing not only flattens cultural complexity but also reinforces divisive imaginaries within and beyond the literary sphere.

Building on this critique, the reductive tendencies of normative translation protocols—what Walter Benjamin incisively terms “unethical” translation in “The Task of the Translator”—further compound these challenges. Such practices erase vital contextual, cultural, and ecological specificities, while obscuring the linguistic innovation and creativity foundational to Mahua as a relational literary identity. In doing so, they inadvertently reproduce and reinforce the very hierarchies these works seek to dismantle, undermining the transformative potential of Mahua literature as a critical and subversive intervention.

Against this backdrop, the significance of the Nanyang as a conceptual framework for reimagining Malaysian literary identity becomes particularly clear when considering authors writing in marginalised linguistic traditions. These writers navigate complex linguistic and cultural terrains shaped by the intersection of Malaysia’s contested language politics and transnational literary networks. Examining the trajectories of Tash Aw and Ng Kim Chew—key figures representing the Anglophone and Sinophone literary traditions, respectively—provides critical insight into how language politics mediate literary production and reception on both local and global levels. Such an analysis underscores the complexities of their positionalities as Anglophone and Sinophone writers, revealing how marginalised literary and linguistic traditions simultaneously resist the homogenising forces of globalisation while asserting their cultural identity and literary significance within Malaysia’s hierarchically structured literary landscape.

Contrasting Marginalities: Tash Aw, Ng Kim Chew, and the Politics of Literary Production and Reception

To illustrate the marginal spaces occupied by Sinophone and Anglophone Malaysian diasporic literatures, I now turn to Tash Aw (b. 1971) and Ng Kim Chew (b. 1967)—two emblematic authors whose works illuminate the deep impact of Malaysia’s institutionalised ethnolinguistic hierarchies on literary production and reception. Although both engage closely with Malaysia’s history and sociocultural contexts, they face distinct modalities of marginalisation arising from the state’s relegation of non-Malay literatures to a “non-national” or even “anti-national” status. This marginalisation stems from the constructed opposition between the “sectional” status assigned to non-Malay languages and literatures and the exclusive notion of “the national”, which governs both literary and public spheres. English-language writing is frequently dismissed as “the language of the coloniser,” while Tamil- and Chinese-language literatures are often framed as culturally “foreign” or disconnected from the national narrative.

Both Aw and Ng navigate the complex terrain of global literary circuits, shaped by market forces and geopolitical pressures. Although Anglophone and Sinophone literatures face parallel marginalisation within Malaysia, the political dynamics shaping their production and reception differ significantly. These differences reveal how linguistic identity and geopolitical context create distinct and uneven forms of exclusion for writers operating outside the dominant Malay literary tradition. Critically examining these trajectories provides deeper insights into how Malaysia’s entrenched ethnolinguistic hierarchies fracture the national literary field and shape the transnational positioning and reception of its diasporic literatures.

This paper undertakes a close examination of two novels by Aw—The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) and Map of the Invisible World (2009)—alongside a detailed reading of the title story from Ng’s Slow Boat to China and Other Stories (2016), which remains the only collection of his fiction available in English translation. As I do not read Chinese, my engagement with Ng’s work primarily relies on this translated collection. To counterbalance this limitation, and given that Ng offers a theoretically richer and more sustained articulation of Nanyang aesthetics in his essays—unlike Aw, who does not explicitly develop this framework—my discussion of Ng’s short story is supplemented by an exploration of his non-fiction essays (also translated into English from the original Chinese) and an interview published in English, in which he elaborates on his decolonial poetics as a Mahua writer.

Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory and Map of the Invisible World

Tash Aw’s Anglophone biographical and creative trajectory exemplifies the distinctive position occupied by English-educated Malaysian writers, who, while remaining “sectional” within Malaysia’s ethnolinguistic literary canon, strategically mobilise the cultural capital of the English language to achieve global literary recognition and navigate complex transnational identities. Aw’s middle-class upbringing in urban Petaling Jaya, Selangor, afforded him access to elite educational institutions, including Cambridge and Warwick, supplemented by an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. His subsequent residences in London and Paris reflect the transnational mobility and cultural capital that Anglophone literature can confer, facilitating entry into international literary markets and readerships. Aw’s acclaimed novels— (The Harmony Silk Factory, 2005; Map of the Invisible World, 2009; Five Star Billionaire, 2013; We, the Survivors, 2019; and The South, 2025)—along with his memoir (The Face: Strangers on a Pier, 2021), have received significant critical recognition, including nominations for major literary awards. This body of work not only underscores Aw’s success in transcending nationalist canons but also embodies a sustained negotiation with transnational belonging, where the tensions between local Southeast Asian histories and global literary frameworks inform and complicate the articulation of a diasporic Anglophone Malaysian identity.

Across his oeuvre, Aw constructs detailed portrayals of Southeast Asia that are deeply rooted in local histories and identities. Yet, the international acclaim and visibility enjoyed by diasporic Anglophone writers like Aw—enabled by global publishing networks—also risk reframing Malaysian literary identity through lenses shaped primarily by dominant global literary markets. The marketing of his novels to meet the commercial tastes and expectations of a worldwide audience often emphasises their universal themes at the expense of their rootedness in specific historical and cultural contexts, thereby obscuring the rich local identities and nuances that infuse his narratives. As with Mahua literature, this tension exemplifies broader patterns within the global literary marketplace, where works from postcolonial contexts are often reinterpreted and repackaged to maximise international appeal and consumption, often resulting in a flattening of localised complexity in favour of more accessible, generalised readings.

For example, the Kinta Valley setting of Aw’s first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, along with its incorporation of pivotal historical moments, including the Japanese Occupation of Malaya (1941-1945), firmly situates the narrative within Malaysia’s distinct geographies and historical realities. These spatiotemporal markers are integral to the novel’s central project to interrogate and subvert dominant narratives within Malaysia’s nationalist politics. Through its exploration of the complexities of mixed-race identity and its ambiguous positioning vis-à-vis colonial powers—both British and Japanese—and hegemonic conceptions of Chineseness, the novel employs fragmented storytelling techniques that disrupt official historiography and challenge fixed claims to cultural identity and historical knowledge.

Notwithstanding this, as Philip Holden, invoking Graham Huggan’s notion of “strategic exoticism,” observes, the novel’s global reception has often foregrounded its exotic Southeast Asian setting rather than its substantive critique of racialised power structures within Malaysia (Holden Reference Holden2012: 73–74). Similarly, Aw’s later novel, We, The Survivors (2019), foregrounds systemic inequality and labour exploitation through the narrative of Ah Hock, a working-class Malaysian convicted of murder. Yet, once again, international critical attention has frequently cast the novel as a “third world tale” of poverty and misfortune, emphasizing an exoticised resonance at the expense of its embedded and incisive critique of Malaysia’s specific socio-economic disparities (cf. Duffy Reference Duffy2019).

Despite their marginalisation within Malaysia’s dominant institutional frameworks and repackaging for global marketability, Anglophone literary works such as Aw’s remain firmly rooted in the nation’s historical and cultural contexts. The Nanyang, both as a geographical imaginary and a dynamic relational construct, offers a valuable analytical lens for exploring the region’s intricate cultural entanglements. Jasper Lim, the narrator of the first of The Harmony Silk Factory’s three parts, describes himself as “most probably descended from” the “itinerant Chinese coolies” who migrated to the Nanyang in the early 1930s (Aw Reference Aw2005: 3). Jasper’s expressed uncertainty about his lineage serves as a recurring motif, deliberately invoking ambiguity to challenge and subvert dominant racialised narratives.

The unsettling of racial determinability intensifies in the novel’s third section, which suggests that Jasper’s father may be either Peter Wormwood (the section’s narrator) or the Japanese scholar Kunichika, rather than Johnny. This narrative ambiguity disrupts essentialist conceptions of identity by complicating genealogical and racial certainties. Furthermore, Jasper’s physical appearance itself functions as a signifier of his unclassifiable identity: his skin is described as “[n]ot brown, not yellow, not white” (Aw Reference Aw2005: 17)—colours that conventionally map onto state-sanctioned Malay, Chinese, and English racial identities, respectively. In doing so, the novel employs the Nanyang imaginary to challenge fixed racialised identities, foregrounding hybridity and cultural fluidity shaped by the region’s complex and interwoven histories.

Structurally, the novel’s three-part format, which narrates the life of its protagonist, “the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny” Lim (Aw Reference Aw2005: 6), acts as a mechanism for subverting singular, authoritative narratives. Each section is told through a first-person perspective, offering a partial and subjective portrayal of Johnny’s identity. Jasper depicts Johnny as a traitorous criminal; Snow’s diary entries reveal a fragile, vulnerable husband; while Peter’s account problematises and destabilises these views by presenting Johnny as a misunderstood figure shaped by colonial violence. This multiplicity of views deliberately denies the reader a settled or definitive understanding of the “real” Johnny, effectively preventing epistemic closure. Beyond a simple narrative strategy, this epistemic multiplicity actively undermines fixed and reductive notions of “Chineseness”, revealing cultural identity to be contingent, contested, and deeply embedded in broader sociopolitical contexts.

Rather than converging into a single, unified narrative, the three interconnected yet irreconcilable stories about Johnny coexist in a dynamic interplay, supplementing one another without collapsing into a singular logic, thereby constituting a narrative “pluriverse”. This concept extends beyond simple multiplicity; it gestures toward a relational complexity where diverse narratives interact while maintaining their distinctiveness. Furthermore, the novel’s invocation of the Nanyang as both a conceptual and imaginary space exemplifies the emergence of hybrid, diasporic local identities within fluid and relational cultural terrains—spaces shaped by intersecting histories, shifting subjectivities, and competing epistemologies that disrupt colonial and nationalist frameworks of fixed racial coherence.

Drawing on Mignolo, the pluriverse is not simply a collection of multiple viewpoints on a single world, but rather a conceptual framework that affirms the coexistence of diverse, often incommensurable worlds and epistemologies—those that actively resist erasure by dominant knowledge systems. In The Harmony Silk Factory, the narrative pluriverse, embodied by Aw’s three divergent narrators, enacts this decolonial vision by rejecting a singular, authoritative account of Johnny’s identity. Aw’s invocation of the Nanyang as a pluriverse foregrounds a space where diverse knowledge systems and histories coexist and interact without being subsumed into a homogenizing whole, rejecting universalizing narratives in favour of a plurality of situated, contextual knowledges that challenge colonial, national, and Western-centric epistemic dominance.

The theme of the fluid ontologies of place, alongside a pointed decolonial critique of nationalist fixities, resonates powerfully in Aw’s second novel, Map of the Invisible World. While it does not explicitly invoke the Nanyang imaginary—rooted historically in the “Southern Ocean” and Chinese diasporic narratives—the novel sustains a critical continuity through its deep engagement with Southeast Asia as a pluriversal world. Within this decolonial spatial and cultural imaginary—the diasporic local cultural geography of the Nanyang in the first novel, and the broader maritime spaces of Southeast Asia in the second—borders no longer function as rigid barriers. Instead, they become sites of relationality and connectivity. This approach subverts territorial nationalism, revealing archipelagic Southeast Asia as a pluriverse characterised by entangled histories and identities, marked by ongoing flows, transformations, and translocal relations—whether through diasporic land geographies or oceanic lifeworlds—and comprising multiple, overlapping modes of belonging.

Set against the volatile national contexts of Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1960s—a period marked by ideological fractures and insurgent violence during the Konfrontasi (Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation)Footnote ⁹ and President Sukarno’s anti-communist purges—the narrative follows the intertwined lives of Adam and Johan, two orphaned brothers abandoned at birth and later separated through adoption into distinct national worlds: Adam is raised in an Indonesian-Dutch household in Jakarta, while Johan grows up with a Malaysian family in Kuala Lumpur. Central to the novel is Adam’s quest to locate his missing adoptive father, Karl, a journey that takes him deep into the turbulent urban core of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. Along the way, he encounters Margaret, an American art historian intimately connected to Karl’s past, as well as a diverse array of characters whose lives criss-cross ethnic, national, and ideological divides.

Aw leverages these fraught moments in Malaysia and Indonesia’s contested territorial landscapes to construct a narrative “map” of an “invisible” world — an intricate web of interconnected and intertwined histories concealed by dominant colonial and nationalist narratives. The recovery of this invisible world, submerged beneath the divisions that separate individuals, communities, and families, hinges on acts of retrieval through affective intimacy, personal memory, and transborder solidarity. Yet this recovery is profoundly complicated by exclusionary nationalist ideologies embodied by Din, an Indonesian revolutionary whose nationalism is grounded in fixed and rigid ethnic and territorial boundaries within the nation. Such a nationalism brands even long-assimilated figures—such as Karl and the peranakan (Straits Chinese) Hanawi—as foreign threats to Indonesia’s perceived purity. Din’s vision conflates nationhood with territoriality, fostering an exclusivist sense of belonging premised on borders as immutable lines demarcating absolute otherness. As Din asserts to Adam, “Javanese should live in Java, not in Nusa Tenggara, Sumatra should remain Sumatran, and so on” (Aw Reference Aw2009: 118), advocating territorialised identities separated by rigid geographic divisions. This form of nationalism rejects plural histories and identities in favour of a homogenised national identity that breeds exclusion and political fanaticism.

In stark contrast to Din’s territorial nationalism, which enforces rigid spatial divisions to sustain exclusivist identities, the sea in Map of the Invisible World operates as a fluid, porous space where multiple presences and ontologies—colonial, post-colonial, human, and non-human—coexist, interact, and dialogically shape one another. The colonial legacy of the Dutch presence is embodied in Karl’s story, especially through his adoption of Adam, illustrating how colonial histories have intricately shaped both personal identities and national narratives. More expansively, the sea symbolises the historic colonial trade routes, migration networks, and cultural exchanges, underscoring its integral role in accommodating and integrating diverse cultural presences and heterogeneous historical formations.

Din’s aspiration to write a “secret history” of the Indonesian islands east of Bali— a “lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners” (Aw Reference Aw2009: 22)—reveals a postcolonial ontology focused on reclaiming marginalised local knowledges obscured by Western narratives. However, this fixation on a purified, bounded past simultaneously reinforces ethno-nationalist boundaries that erase shared histories and connectedness, engendering a xenophobia masquerading as anti-colonial nationalism. The novel further foregrounds Indonesia’s postcolonial turmoil as a backdrop against which characters like Adam and Karl must continually negotiate the fragile, often contentious terrain of their identities.

The novel invokes a human ontology through its intimate exploration of personal ties, emotional experiences, and fraught relationships, embodied poignantly in Adam’s search for his brother Johan and his complex bond with Karl, alongside the multiple relational threads woven throughout the narrative. Yet, this human ontology remains deeply entangled with a non-human one, underscoring the profound interconnectedness of all beings within the novel’s world. The sea—with its reefs, currents, and creatures such as “kaleidoscopic fish, purple sea urchins and pulsating starfish” (Aw Reference Aw2009: 34)—embodies this non-human ontology. It is Adam’s initiation into the mysteries of this non-human ecology that drives his unfolding maturity, fostering a profound awareness of his interconnectedness with the world beyond human boundaries and reshaping his understanding of identity and belonging. While the sea exists independently of human ontology, it remains inextricably linked to human experience, simultaneously offering solace and evoking an overwhelming awareness of “the endlessness of its possibilities” (Aw Reference Aw2009: 33–34). In this way, the novel situates multiple ontologies—colonial and post-colonial histories, human and non-human ecologies—as distinct yet convergent in the fluid, liminal space of the sea.

Adam and Johan’s shared engagement with the sea gestures powerfully toward a larger, interconnected, and indivisible pluriverse, aligning with Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters’s concept of “wet ontologies” (2015), where the sea is not a passive or inert backdrop but an active, dynamic force shaped by and shaping human and non-human interactions. Johan’s encounter with the sea off Malaysia’s coast—“fields of coral, which, in the moonlight, looked like a shadowy map of an unknown world where the boundaries were uncertain and the countries kept changing shape” (Aw Reference Aw2009: 131)—captures this ontological fluidity, capturing the sea’s capacity to dissolve fixed boundaries and nationalism’s territorial limits into ever-changing, relational spaces of connection. As matter in the sea constantly shifts between states—liquid, ice, vapour—the sea’s “material and phenomenological distinctiveness” (Steinberg and Peters Reference Steinberg and Peters2015: 248) challenges the “flat” or “vertical” ontologies underpinning nationalist identity and spatial frameworks, which presume fixity and boundedness.

Similarly, Adam’s experience of unboundedness and oneness with the sea as he swims off the fictional island of Nusa Pedro, where he “surrendered his body to the waves, his arms and legs moving with a freedom he had never known” (Aw Reference Aw2009: 153), embodies a recognition of the sea as a constantly “rebordering” space that resists fixed cartographic divisions. Burdened by fractured familial and national identities, Adam’s moments in the sea are when he can physically and spiritually surrender to a space that defies rigid borders and identities, embodying a liberating “freedom” from the restrictions that have shaped his existence.

While Johan and Adam likely engage with different seas—the South China Sea for Johan and the Indian Ocean or Java Sea for Adam—both belong to Southeast Asia’s vast, interconnected maritime landscape. Through the lens of wet ontologies, the sea disrupts conventional cartographic and political boundaries, revealing itself as a relational and fluid space where human and non-human lifeworlds continuously merge through movement and transformation. Despite engaging with distinct bodies of water, Johan and Adam remain entwined within the same dynamic oceanic system. Their shared, transformative encounters with the sea as an “open, immanent, and ever-becoming” entity (Steinberg and Peters Reference Steinberg and Peters2015: 247) allow Aw to advance a potent critique of Southeast Asia as a fragmented archipelago of territorial states, envisioning instead a decolonial “rebordering” nexus of interconnected worlds and pluriversal modes of being and becoming.

The preceding discussion illustrates how Aw’s works, as seminal texts within Malaysia’s Anglophone literary tradition, navigate the complex intersections of national histories and global forces while invoking the Nanyang as a critical decolonial imaginary. This analysis further reveals that although Anglophone Malaysian literature remains marginalised within the national literary canon, it strategically leverages the global reach of English to secure broader audiences and expanded publishing opportunities. Consequently, it attains relative advantages over Sinophone Malaysian literature in terms of international visibility and access to global markets, thus participating in a transnational circulation that challenges local marginalisation while complicating questions of linguistic and cultural identity.Footnote ¹⁰

Ng Kim Chew, “Slow Boat to China”

The comparative advantages enjoyed by Anglophone Malaysian literature cast into sharper relief the unique challenges faced by Sinophone Malaysian literature. Alison Groppe’s observation that Sinophone Malaysian literature is doubly marginalised—excluded from Malaysia’s national canon, which recognises only Malay-language works as authentic markers of nationhood, and sidelined within the Sinosphere as Chinese-language writing produced outside China (Groppe Reference Groppe2013: 2)—underscores the precarious position of Mahua literature. These challenges are further compounded by its systemic erasure within a global literary system that privileges English as the dominant language of production and consumption.

This observation applies to the works of Ng Kim Chew, the leading figure in Sinophone Malaysian literature who occupies a profoundly precarious position shaped by overlapping marginalities. Ng’s writings suffer near invisibility not only within Malaysian and Western literary canons but also within the broader field of Chinese-language literature produced outside China. He characterises this latter domain as increasingly perceived “as a unified field known alternatively as world Huawen literature, overseas Huawen literature, or ‘Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese literature’” (Ng Reference Ng, Rofel and Rojas2022: 81). This marginalisation highlights the complex positionality of Mahua literature, which remains peripheral both to national literary traditions that privilege Malay and to wider Sinophone literary spaces dominated by Chinese geopolitical imaginaries. This dual marginality underscores the substantial challenges Mahua writers encounter in securing recognition across multiple, intersecting cultural and political contexts.

Furthermore, English translations of Ng’s work, published by US-academic presses catering primarily to a niche Sinophone Studies audience, are often miscategorised as “literature from Taiwan”. This misclassification, resulting from Ng’s reliance on Taiwan’s academic and publishing infrastructure for dissemination and promotion, effectively confines scholarly engagement with his work to a Taiwan-centric circuit. Furthermore, the relatively limited commercial success and institutional recognition of Ng’s works even within Taiwan reflect the broader marginalisation confronting Mahua literature—a tradition persistently overshadowed by the dominant creative outputs from the region. As Ng himself laments, “Chinese-language literature does not receive even as much attention as Vietnamese or Korean literature” (Ng Reference Ng, Rofel and Rojas2022: 75), highlighting yet another layer of invisibility within the global literary system. These compounded forms of marginalisation—which arise from Mahua literature being “positioned at the periphery of the periphery” (Ng Reference Ng, Rofel and Rojas2022: 82)—underscore the serious challenges Sinophone Malaysian authors face as they navigate transnational literary networks shaped by linguistic hierarchies and geopolitical biases.

Born on a rubber estate in rural Johor, the southernmost state of peninsular Malaysia, Ng moved to Taiwan in the late 1980s to pursue higher education—a common path for Malaysian youths educated in Chinese-medium schools who could not gain admission to local universities. After completing his studies, Ng chose to remain in Taiwan, largely for professional reasons (Tee Reference Tee, Shih, Tsai and Bernards2013: 312). He is currently Professor of Sinophone Literature at National Chi Nan University. Ng is also a prize-winning author, primarily renowned for his short stories, which continue to be his preferred literary genre. His notable collections are Dream and Swine and Aurora (1994), Dark Night (1997), Inscribed Backs (2001), and Memorandums of the South Seas People’s Republic (2007).

Ng’s Slow Boat to China and Other Stories, Footnote ¹¹ a collection of English translations of twelve short stories drawn from his first three fiction volumes, explores the complexities of Malaysian Chinese identity and cultural belonging through subversive, experimental engagements with the Nanyang imaginary. The epigraph to the title story is taken from one of the earliest commercially published Malay-language texts, Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah ke Kelantan (“The Story of Abdullah’s Sea Voyage to Kelantan”), a travelogue by Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (widely known as Munshi Abdullah). This text recounts Abdullah’s 1838 maritime journey from Singapore to Kelantan, where he delivered letters of appeal from Sir George Bonham, Governor of the Straits Settlements, to three Rajas of Kelantan who had stopped boats carrying valuable merchandise belonging to Chinese and Jewish traders from Singapore. These three letters are referenced in the story’s epigraph. Just as the nineteenth-century Malay literary text records Abdullah’s firsthand experiences in Pahang and Terengganu during his journey north to Kelantan—documenting local peoples, customs and critically observing Malay society, governance, and institutions—Ng’s narrative similarly weaves together personal and collective histories.

Ng’s invocation of Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah ke Kelantan invites a closer consideration of its author, Munshi Abdullah (1796-1854). Abdullah—who was born in Melaka, spent much of his life in Singapore, and died in Jeddah, then part of the Ottoman Empire—was a prominent scribe, court interpreter, language teacher, and translator, notably translating The Bible into Malay.Footnote ¹² He lived and wrote at a critical historical juncture when the pluriversal cultural geographies of the Malay world—shaped and sustained through maritime trade, diplomatic networks, and oceanic circulations—began to be constrained by emerging colonial structures. It is ironic that the state and its institutions, whose policies on racialised differentiation implicitly rest on the idea of a pure and singular “race” identity, have designated Abdullah—a creole Hadrami of Arab (Yemeni), Indian, and Malay descent and a Tamil-speaking Muslim—as the “Father of Modern Malay Literature”. As Sumit Mandal argues, the anachronistic imposition of national and ethnic categories onto a nineteenth-century writer like Abdullah in the move to construct a national canon has resulted in the erasure of the creolised cultural identity he embodied, reducing him instead to an essentialised Malay racial identity (Mandal Reference Mandal, Gabriel and Rosa2015: 71).

Ng’s choice of epigraph thus functions as a crucial narrative device, establishing a pointed and layered thematic, historical, and ideological framework for his story. By referencing a foundational Malay-language literary text by a canonical writer, Ng not only reclaims the relationality of the Nanyang—a relationality suppressed by nationalist literary canons—but also invokes the complex entanglements between colonial and nationalist histories, local and diasporic identities, and the very act of storytelling itself. This is also his way of asserting his identification with a local literary identity, as the epigraph in Malay serves as an act of self-positioning that displaces his immediate filiation to mainstream Chinese literature. Instead, it advocates for a literary tradition that is deeply rooted in Malaysia’s pluriversal historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, Ng situates Mahua literature as a fundamentally diasporic local articulation, one that asserts its distinctiveness while remaining in critical dialogue with China’s broader literary heritage.

The story centres on Tie Niu, a young boy who runs away from his village on the back of his family’s water buffalo. His journey is sparked by a local legend narrated by an old story teller of indeterminate name and age, who is simply called Orang China (“Chinaman”) by the Malays in the village (Ng Reference Ng2016: 185). The storyteller recounts the myth of Zheng He’s abandoned ship, said to set sail from “some hidden harbor in the north” every ten years or so, coinciding with the eve of the annual Duanwu Festival, for its interminably slow voyage back to China (Ng Reference Ng2016: 185).Footnote ¹³ The old man, habitually seated in the same spot outside the village coffee shop flanked by two tall durian trees, tells various stories from Chinese folklore to the village children. However, it is the tale of Zheng He’s abandoned ship that grips Tie Niu’s imagination, deepening his quest to locate this mythical ship and to connect with an ancestral homeland he has never seen but only known through stories recounted by his mother and the old Chinaman. Fuelling this quest is the boy’s yearning to reunite with his father in China—a desire rooted in poignant euphemism, since his father is, in fact, deceased. His mother’s delicate framing of his father’s death as a “return to China” convinces Tie Niu that such a reunion is possible should he reach Beijing himself, thus infusing his journey with both personal loss and cultural longing.

In narrating the boy’s journey through the Malay kampungs, Chinese new villages, and Indian towns in search of Zheng He’s mythical vessel, the story meticulously records his encounters with both the human and non-human inhabitants of the places he stops at or passes through in the Malaysian countryside — ranging from diverse ethnic communities to the region’s distinctive flora and fauna. Tie Niu’s traversal of these culturally inflected landscapes, shaped by Chinese, Malay, and Indian influences, immerses him in Malaysia’s multicultural realities as he pursues the boat that connects him to his imaginary homeland of China. Having left behind his home in the village, and its familiar surroundings, Tie Niu confronts many hardships along his passage, yet he remains determined to complete his quest.

The old storyteller’s account of Zheng He’s abandoned ship situates the narrative within a rich interplay of history and folklore, skilfully intertwining fact and myth to probe themes of diaspora, history, displacement, belonging, and, ultimately, the processes behind the formation of diasporic local identity. By invoking Zheng He, Ng not only anchors Tie Niu’s personal odyssey within the larger historical narratives of Chinese maritime exploration and migration to the Nanyang but also gestures toward the Nanyang as an imaginary of belonging, one that embodies a pluriverse of attachments, desires, and displacements. This pluriversal framework recognises the Nanyang not as a fixed geographical or cultural destination but as a dynamic, transborder space where multiple histories and identities intersect, continuously negotiated through the lived experiences of diaspora and the ongoing search for home.

As crucially, the story’s epigraph serves as a historical anchor linking Ng’s protagonist’s journey to an undisclosed northern Malaysia harbour with Munshi Abdullah’s nineteenth-century travels across the northern Malay states, as chronicled in Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah ke Kelantan. By embedding one voyage within another, one text within another, one history within another, Ng’s intertextual strategy not only foregrounds the constructed nature of identity but also elucidates the pluriversal complexities that define diasporic local subjectivities—identities that are multiple, layered, and continually negotiated. In “Slow Boat to China”, the epigraph, the old Chinaman’s stories, and Tie Niu’s central quest serve both as narrative mechanisms and reflexive meta-commentaries on the act and function of storytelling itself. Collectively, these intertwined stories constitute a pluriverse, wherein oral traditions, classical and national literary canons, and contemporary literary forms coexist and interact, marked by porous and fluid boundaries rather than fixed and hierarchical divisions.

Significantly, “Slow Boat to China” is punctuated by interjections in both Malay and Chinese, reflecting the multilingual and multicultural dynamics that are central to the story’s exploration of literary identity, cultural relationality, and the tensions arising from Malaysia’s institutionalised framework of multiculturalism. Tie Niu’s desire to journey to China is made possible by his attentive listening to the myriad tales recited by the village storyteller to him and the other children. These stories are likely delivered in one of the Southern Chinese topolects—such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, or Hainanese—brought to the Nanyang by immigrants, including presumably the old storyteller himself. In this role, the old storyteller assumes the position of the village’s custodian of cultural knowledge and the living embodiment of an oral tradition that preserves and actively transmits cultural memories and connections to the ancestral homeland. Ng’s narrative further describes the old man as exceptionally well-versed in Chinese legends and myths, which he skilfully weaves together with references to classical texts, situating his storytelling within a broader literary and cultural continuum:

While Tie Niu’s connection to his cultural heritage is primarily reinforced by the stories he hears and absorbs from the village Orang Cina, his lived experiences are simultaneously mediated through Malay (and its vernacular variants), English (including the localised vernacular “Manglish”), and Tamil (as well as other Indian languages). This plurilingual matrix not only shapes Tie Niu’s evolving cultural consciousness but also exemplifies the intrinsic hybridity of Mahua literature. Such hybridity functions as a critical intervention that unsettles dominant narratives, challenging both Chinese cultural and linguistic imperialism and the exclusivist ethno-Malay nationalism that seeks to define Malaysian identity along monolingual and monocultural lines.

However, crafting a heterogeneous languaging practice that effectively represents the multilingual realities of the Malaysian Chinese context within the structural confines of Mandarin presents a significant challenge. As Ng acknowledges in a scholarly essay, Mahua literature often struggles to capture the “multilingual environment of Malaysian society”. Beyond the Chinese dialects—such as Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochiu, and Hailam—that resist straightforward representation in writing, there are also Malay, English, and Indian languages, all of which permeate the spoken Mandarin or Hanyu (Ng Reference Ng, Shih, Tsai and Bernards2013: 76). Ng’s insight demonstrates that the Nanyang aesthetic not only shapes the thematic concerns of Mahua literature but also compels its writers to strategically challenge traditional notions of Chinese linguistic purity and literary identity. As Ng puts it, the use of local dialects and mixed linguistic forms in his works serves “to explode [the] standardised imperial language” (Ng Reference Ng, Rofel and Rojas2022: 90). This reimagining of the Nanyang as an imaginary that disrupts both linguistic and cultural norms foregrounds its relational complexity and highlights its subversive power as a diasporic local imaginary.

In “Slow Boat to China”, then, Ng’s epigraph and metafictional storytelling techniques function to critique Malaysia’s state-propagated multiculturalism and its monolingual, institutionally sanctioned literary frameworks. The epigraph evokes a historical moment when Malaya was part of a diverse yet interconnected Malay world pluriverse, starkly contrasting this historical world with the deeply fissured postcolonial nation-state of the late 1960s, the novel’s temporal setting. In the course of his gruelling quest to find Zheng He’s boat, Tie Niu witnesses the violent riots of 1969. Ng references these riots not only as historical markers but as a means to deepen the exploration of identity and belonging in an alienating landscape. More than a contextual backdrop, the riots compel Ng’s protagonist to confront a moment of collective trauma and political violence that, as Groppe argues, is central to Malaysian Chinese identity formation (Groppe Reference Groppe2013: 149). Through this allusion to a key moment of historical rupture, which laid bare the limits of Malaysia’s multiculturalism, Ng criticises the institutionalised racialised politics that have shaped the nation while simultaneously emphasizing the resilience of Malaysian Chinese—and Mahua—identities in responding to the pressures of post-1969 national restructuring, which reinforced their marginalisation.

Tie Niu survives the riots but emerges profoundly shaken, his battered psyche becoming a haunting allegory for a nation adrift due to the state’s failure to establish stable grounds of belonging for its ethnic minority communities. The violence reveals a collective fracture: Tie Niu’s fragile psychological state mirrors the broader social disintegration, a fracture reflected in the disjointed narrative prose that immerses the reader in the protagonist’s unravelling coherence. Furthermore, the italicised passages interspersed throughout the narrative serve as visual disruptions to its linear progression, linking Tie Niu’s personal turmoil to wider cultural and historical forces. These seemingly random segments in italics, combined with dream-like sequences that blur the boundaries between waking and hallucination, contribute to the narrative’s fragmented and unsettled structure.

At his next stop, Tie Niu is taken in by a poor, childless Malay couple who, regarding him as a blessing from Allah, adopt him as their own, give him the name “Abdullah”, and convert him to Islam. After several years, Tie Niu/Abdullah leaves his adoptive family to continue his search for the ancient boat. When he finally finds Zheng He’s lost treasure ship, it turns out to be a sunken, decaying vessel, guarded by a white tiger whom villagers believe to be the reincarnation of Zheng He. The government’s modernisation drive soon excavates and relocates the ship, detaching it from its harbour. Tie Niu/Abdullah never sees the tiger or the ship again, highlighting both the impossibility of fully recovering history and the generative necessity of cultural loss in shaping diasporic local experience and identity formation.

At the story’s conclusion, after years of wandering from island to island, Tie Niu/Abdullah awakens one day to find himself aboard a boat with a group of Chinese men and a “dark-skinned” man dressed in “baju Melayu” (Malay attire), who “looked Indian” (Ng Reference Ng2016: 208). One of the Chinese men, speaking in Min Nan dialect, introduces the man to Tie Niu/Abdullah as “[their]chief, the famous Munshi Abdullah” (Ng Reference Ng2016: 208). Whether this encounter is hallucinatory or real remains deliberately ambiguous—one of several narrative strategies Ng employs to unsettle fixed notions of identity and reality. Although Tie Niu/Abdullah finds himself on a boat, it is not the one destined for China. Instead, he is in the company of Munshi Abdullah, who is symbolically completing his historical journey—one that began in Singapore—by returning from Kelantan to Singapore, fulfilling the mission outlined in the story’s epigraph.

Crucially, the “return” journey “home” subverts expectations by unfolding not as a northward voyage from Malaysia to China, but as an unanticipated southward passage from Kelantan to Singapore—retracing, in its southward trajectory, that historic migration from China to the Nanyang or the “South Seas”. This movement south problematises the very notion of a fixed, recoverable ancestral homeland. For the diasporic local subject, “home” emerges not as a primordial or singular site but as a mutable and contested space of identity, continuously negotiated through the interplay of diverse cultural presences and historical influences. Within this framework, “return” operates as an allegory for the ongoing processes of cultural belonging within a pluriversal landscape—one defined by the coexistence and intersection of diverse histories, epistemologies, languages, and cultural practices. Here, the homeland is not simply reclaimed as a point of pristine origin or essence but reimagined as a site of multiplicity and fluidity.

Tie Niu—who undergoes a metamorphosis from Tie Niu to Tie Niu/Abdullah—emerges from his prolonged, arduous passage across the Nanyang/Malay world pluriverse as a richly emblematic figure representing the region’s interwoven cultural realities. Indeed, Ng’s narrative pluriverse actively unsettles singular historical and cultural epistemologies, compelling readers to reconsider Malaysian Chinese identity—and by extension Mahua literary culture—as fluid, overlapping formations shaped by movement, multiplicity, and relationality. This reconceptualisation foregrounds home as an ongoing, contingent process rather than a static condition, emphasizing how identities are continually negotiated through cultural encounter. In this light, Tie Niu/Abdullah’s diasporic local adaptability and capacity for transformation contrast sharply with the figure of the old immigrant storyteller from China, whose immobility—both physical and symbolic—encapsulates an inflexible attachment to origin. Seated, unmoving, in the same spot outside the village coffeeshop and endlessly recounting tales from his homeland, the old storyteller becomes an emblem of cultural stasis, underscoring his inability or refusal to engage with new contexts and hence his exclusion from the dynamic processes of identity formation that Tie Niu/Abdullah exemplifies.

A Poetics of “Statelessness”: Delinking from the State

In a 2018 interview for the literary journal SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, Ng articulates his identity as a Mahua writer through the lens of Sinophone literature, which he describes as “fundamentally stateless (無國籍華文文學)” (Ng Reference Groppe2018: 71). This choice of term should not be understood merely as a descriptive category of Mahua’s literary formation but as a deliberate act of defiance against Malaysia’s ethnocentric policies, which continue to marginalise Sinophone literature as “sectional” and secondary in terms of national importance. As Ng explains, “I see my Mahua writer’s status as dissociated from the state,” signalling a conscious break not only from Malaysia’s official literary taxonomy but also from the institutional apparatuses of power that regulate cultural production (Ng Reference Groppe2018: 71). This defiant stance disrupts the normative framework of literary and cultural identity by decoupling it from a formal affiliation with state-based nationalism — a position Ng enacted symbolically through his renunciation of Malaysian nationality.

Whereas scholars of Sinophone Malaysian literature have often described Mahua literature as “nationless” (see, for example, Groppe Reference Groppe2013: 2), Ng’s choice of terminology introduces a sharper, more conceptually significant distinction in his literary subjectivity. It signals his disassociation not from the nation but from the state. This differentiation between “nationless” and “stateless” is crucial: while the nation represents a cultural imaginary grounded in shared histories, collective identities, and affective belonging, the state operates as a concrete apparatus of political authority and institutional control that enforces hierarchies and boundaries on literary cultures and identities. Ng’s refusal to submit to the state’s narratives of identity, language, and culture—and its conditions for recognition—does not equate to a rejection of his Malaysian cultural identity. On the contrary, by affirming himself as a Mahua writer and framing his work as expressions of Mahua culture, Ng firmly anchors his literary and cultural belonging within Malaysia. His reframing of statelessness as an active refusal of fixed, state-imposed definitions of literary identity should not be interpreted as rootlessness or alienation. Rather, statelessness becomes a mode of empowerment, enabling the writer to carve out and inhabit a space where Mahua, as the Sinophone literature of Malaysia, can resist state hegemony while continuing to engage with culture and society.

This strategic positioning also signifies Ng’s deliberate refusal to subordinate Mahua literature to the literary nationalism of either mainland China or Malaysia. By rejecting both the dominant Malay-centric nationalism and mainland Chinese nationalism that frame Mahua literature as a marginal offshoot of “cultural China”, Ng asserts a relational space—a poetics of statelessness—anchored in the rich plurality of languages and cultural interactions within the Malaysian nation, yet beyond the ideological and political control of the state.

For Ng, then, asserting a stateless Nanyang identity for Mahua literature is far from a passive withdrawal from nationalist and state hegemonies; it is an active, critical resistance against marginalisation. This stance also entails a rigorous interrogation of the state’s monopoly over the national narrative and its claim to cultural ownership and control. Ng’s work challenges the mechanisms through which the state regulates cultural identity and defines belonging, especially through official literary taxonomies and their hierarchical valuations. At the heart of Ng’s critique lies a deliberate emphasis on imaginaries grounded in a pluriverse of languages and cultural relations, as opposed to monolingual or monolithic frameworks. This pluriversal approach—vividly manifested in “Slow Boat to China”—transcends mere stylistic or linguistic experimentation; it operates as a political strategy that confronts ethnolinguistic hierarchies and nationalist taxonomies. By weaving Hokkien idioms and Malay vernaculars into his Chinese-language texts, Ng demonstrates how Mahua literature enacts a relational linguistic space that defies fixed national and linguistic borders.

Ng’s plurilingual approach, which simultaneously deploys multiple languages, underscores their shared kinship within the fluid linguistic framework constructed by Mahua literature. Rather than emphasizing divergence, this method moves languages toward a dynamic point of convergence, while preserving their distinct differences. It parallels Walter Benjamin’s idea of “pure language”— a linguistic ideal that transcends singular language systems through the collective interplay and mutual interaction of all tongues (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Arendt1968: 74). While Benjamin originally conceived this concept in the context of textual translation, its relevance here emerges through Ng’s subversion of linguistic hierarchies. In Ng’s works, languages do not vie for dominance but engage dialogically, defamiliarizing and enriching one another, thereby generating novel modes of cultural transformation and resilience.

Through these strategies, Ng critically challenges traditional literary centres—namely China, Malaysia, and Taiwan—by positioning the Nanyang as a relational and decolonial space that resists and destabilises hegemonic paradigms and entrenched national traditions. Ng openly critiques the tendency of these dominant frameworks to marginalise Sinophone literature as mere “ethnic” production or “sectional literature” within multicultural nation-states like Malaysia (Ng Reference Ng, Tsu and Wang2010: 23). His diverse cast of multiethnic characters vividly embodies this stateless orientation, subverting both the “nationalism of ‘cultural China’” (Ng Reference Ng, Rofel and Rojas2022: 81)—which casts Mahua literature as a diasporic offshoot of Chineseness detached from local realities—and Malay-centric nationalism, which problematically renders ethnic Chinese as perpetual outsiders or pendatang (“new arrivals”), denying them equal recognition as rightful cultural heirs of the national “soil”.

Ng’s poetics of statelessness importantly aligns with broader decolonial critiques emerging from the Global South. As Mignolo contends, decoloniality fundamentally involves a “delinking” from the colonial matrix of power, including the hegemonic nation-state, which sustains colonial legacies by controlling knowledge and cultural production. Ng’s rejection of both Malaysian and mainland Chinese literary hegemonies can therefore be read as a form of epistemic disobedience, embodying a refusal to be confined by the insular and nativist discourses endorsed by the nation-state. By foregrounding plurilingualism and interethnic exchange, Ng’s self-positioning—as a Mahua writer employing what he terms a “Southern Ocean subjectivity” (Ng Reference Ng, Tsu and Wang2010: 22)—calls for reimagining diaspora not as a fixed inheritance but as a dynamic, processual formation shaped through intertwined local histories and palimpsestic, overlapping cultural networks. This diasporic local and stateless approach privileges relationality and exchange over rigid binaries of identity, emphasizing the fluid interconnectedness of Nanyang or Southern Ocean identities across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. Such pluriversal linguistic and cultural hybridity also reflects Ng’s conceptualisation of the Nanyang as a relational and ultimately decolonial space—one where identities are continuously negotiated through movement, interconnectedness, and exchange, rather than through fixed or essentialist claims.

Weihsin Gui’s insights in National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics (Reference Gui2013) deepen the conceptual framework by emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between nation and state. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak, Gui argues that “the differentiation between nation and state is part of transnational literacy” (Gui Reference Gui2013: 36). This notion of transnational literacy resonates strongly with Ng’s poetics of statelessness, framing it as a form of cultural competence—one that critically engages with and navigates complex cultural networks while deliberately rejecting nationalist mythologies and state-sanctioned classifications.

Moreover, statelessness, as articulated by Ng, is not a dead or passive condition. Rather, it is a proactive and generative space from which relational literary identities and cultures can emerge, freed from the constraints imposed by state power. This poetics of statelessness challenges conventional thinking by refusing to see statelessness as mere absence or loss. Instead, it envisions a dynamic and fertile site for cultural creativity and resistance. Ng invites scholars and readers to move beyond monolingual and monocultural frameworks, embracing Mahua literature as an evolving formation shaped by local histories, multilingual experiences, and intersubjective connections that transcend state and national boundaries. In this way, statelessness becomes a critical mode of empowerment and cultural survival, enabling new possibilities for belonging and identity beyond fixed nationalist categories.

Importantly, Ng’s embrace of statelessness resonates deeply with his related notion of “outsideness”, a concept he elaborates at greater length in his chapter “World Republic of Southern Letters” (Reference Ng, Rofel and Rojas2022). Here, Ng develops a transregional framework for Mahua literature that amplifies histories and perspectives from the Global South. By advocating for alternative articulations of identity, language, and community, Ng repositions Mahua literature as constituting a “World Republic of Southern Letters,” a cultural formation and political project that asserts its own distinct priorities and epistemologies. Crucially, he emphasises that the narrative and linguistic strategies underlying this emerging literary geography are not aimed at “entering the center” of canonical recognition but rather at “being outside” (Ng Reference Ng, Rofel and Rojas2022: 89). This deliberate rejection of assimilation and co-optation by dominant centres positions “outsideness” as a strategic and generative stance – one that simultaneously critiques and transcends hegemonic Northern geopolitical and linguistic hierarchies.

In sum, by asserting this creative yet resistant identity for Mahua literature, statelessness alongside “outsideness” functions as a vital decolonial practice rooted in the Global South. Together, these concepts displace Mahua literature from state-sanctioned ethnolinguistic hierarchies and nationalist frameworks, placing it beyond the dominant centres of linguistic and literary authority. Simultaneously, they affirm the pluriversal multiplicity inherent in Sinophone Malaysian production. Far from pursuing entry into hegemonic discourses or nationalist canons, Mahua literature—in Ng’s formulation—inhabits a critical, dynamic space outside and beyond those hegemonies.

Conclusion: Nanyang and Other Pluriversal Imaginaries

The trajectories of Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literatures illuminate how these distinct traditions intersect within the cultural and political space of the Nanyang through their shared resistance to sedentary nationalist hegemonies and entrenched linguistic hierarchies. Adopting a pluriversal framework, this paper further demonstrates that although both Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literatures converge in their critique of dominant paradigms, the narrative strategies and techniques through which they articulate resistance are differently inflected, shaped by their authors’ unique backgrounds, histories, and linguistic and literary traditions. This differentiation underscores not only the coexistence of these diverse literary traditions but also reinforces the non-hierarchical relationality central to the pluriversal framework. In doing so, it challenges conventional cultural and national imaginaries and promotes a more inclusive understanding of Malaysian literary production.

In The Harmony Silk Factory, Tash Aw strategically employs polyphonic narration to embody the pluriverse—the coexistence of multiple, often incommensurable epistemologies—thus unsettling sedentary nationalist historiography. Through its tripartite, discordant first-person perspectives, the novel rejects narrative unity and singular authority, presenting instead partial, conflicting accounts that mirror the lived experience of situated knowledge. Beyond simply offering multiple viewpoints, Aw grounds this multiplicity within the relational space of the Nanyang imaginary—a terrain shaped by transregional flows, diasporic subjectivities, and overlapping colonial histories—where divergent voices coexist and intersect without collapsing into a singular “truth”. This narrative strategy effectively delinks the story from fixed, linear historiographies, foregrounding instead diverse epistemologies and experiences. This multiplicity not only challenges colonial and nationalist narratives but also exemplifies the dialogic and supplementary interrelations fundamental to pluriversal thinking. Furthermore, Aw utilises narrative ambiguity to expose the contingency and constructedness of racial and cultural categories, resisting epistemic closure. Thus, the novel transcends mere polyphony and ambiguity to enact a critical decolonial intervention, actively destabilizing epistemic dominance by affirming heterogeneity and the productive tensions generated by diverse knowledge systems.

The refracting of nationalist certitudes through intimate and affective registers continues to resonate in Aw’s second novel. Emphasizing archipelagic geographies and “wet ontologies”, Map of the Invisible World foregrounds entangled, plural spaces that transcend nationalist and regional boundaries rather than reaffirming fixed, static narratives. By situating his characters in spaces that defy territorial definitions of identity and belonging, Aw retrieves an alternative world characterised not by stasis and control but by flows and mobility. Central to this is his turn to the sea itself—its fluidity, liquidities, and visceral encounters—as a critical site of decolonial practice. Through “thinking with the sea”, Aw reconceptualises the Nanyang and the broader maritime realms of Southeast Asia as interconnected, agentive spaces that challenge static, bounded notions of geography, identity, and belonging. This maritime perspective opens up a dynamic framework where identities and histories are constantly negotiated through movement and exchange, embodying a resistance to nationalist and territorial fixity while affirming the porous, relational realities of archipelagic Southeast Asia.

In a parallel yet distinctive move, Ng Kim Chew’s short story “Slow Boat to China” and his broader theorisation of statelessness engage multilingualism, intertextuality, and narrative fragmentation to unravel state-endorsed notions of fixed origins and destinations. Moving decisively away from dominant Sinocentric and Malay-hegemonic frameworks, Ng reclaims the Nanyang as a decolonial space by disrupting conventional linguistic boundaries and interweaving Hokkien and Malay vernaculars within Chinese, thereby subverting rigid cultural binaries. His experimental narrative structure—marked by non-linear time and disrupted chronology—mirrors the fluid, displaced realities of diasporic communities throughout Southeast Asia.

The endless journeying by the story’s titular boat allegorises the impossibility of homecoming, destabilizing both hegemonic state-centred Malaysian narratives that question the cultural loyalty of diasporic local communities as well as Sinocentric frameworks that reduce Chineseness to a homogenised diasporic identity. For Ng, the Nanyang as a pluriverse represents a dynamic convergence of overlapping historical narratives, dismantling monolithic, state-centred identities. Instead, it highlights practices of interaction, interconnectedness, and dialogic relationality, creating crucial openings for the emergence of relational literary identities and cultural formations beyond nationalist paradigms.

Read together, Aw and Ng’s pluriversal storytelling and stateless allegories enact a shared mode of convergence in the Nanyang by unsettling unitary epistemologies and foregrounding fluidity, relationality, and non-hierarchical coexistence. Within this comparative framework, the Nanyang emerges as a space where divergent textual strategies collaborate to envision literary and cultural communities in more inclusive and expansive ways. Aw’s polyphonic narration, archipelagic setting, intimate registers, and wet ontologies alongside Ng’s narrative indeterminacy that suspends resolution, linguistic experimentation, and intertextuality collectively fragment authority, emphasise entanglement, and insist on multiple coexisting perspectives rather than a homogenised or hierarchical frame. Their narrative techniques represent supplementary yet distinct variations of a shared decolonial practice—one that destabilises singular authority and rejects state-centred epistemologies.

This framework transcends mere comparative analysis by revealing a mode of convergence where diverse literary strategies and priorities collaborate without erasing their specific differences, thereby enacting epistemic disobedience and co-constituting a shared pluriversal vision. In this process, the Nanyang is reconceptualised not merely as a geographic or historical site of convergence, but as a pluriversal epistemic space where Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literatures mutually reinforce each other in supplementary ways. Together, they collectively delink from colonial legacies, expand relational possibilities, and resist homogenizing state-centred imaginaries, offering a more inclusive and dynamic understanding of Malaysian literary production.

Ultimately, the Nanyang, alongside other Southeast Asian littoral imaginaries such as Nusantara and Tanah Air—and potentially additional concepts drawn from the region’s diverse linguistic and cultural traditions—offers a dynamic vantage point for reimagining the region’s relational literary identities. These pluriversal imaginaries evoke the region’s complex littoral histories, shared borderlands of exchange, and ecological interconnections, effectively challenging static epistemologies of culture and identity founded on singular, unified notions of space and belonging.

Like the Nanyang—whose rerouted and continually evolving permutations trace its transformation from a “fantastical realm of ‘southern barbarians’” in the imperial Chinese context (Bernards Reference Bernards2016: 30) to a contemporary site of diasporic locality and statelessness—the concept of the Nusantara has also undergone significant historic reconfiguration (Evers Reference Evers2016). Originating from the Sanskrit words “nusa” meaning “island” and “antara” meaning “in between”, “Nusantara” first appeared in fourteenth-century Javanese texts as a term denoting the maritime peripheries of the Majapahit Empire and later resurfaced in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Writers, novelists, poets, and politicians across Indonesia and Malaysia invoked it as the symbol of an emerging anti-colonial consciousness (Evers Reference Evers2016). Reinvigorated in the 1990s through a Nusantara youth culture encompassing Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, southern Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore, this imaginary embodies a regional consciousness grounded in maritime connectivity (Evers Reference Evers2016).Footnote ¹⁴

In a complementary vein, the relatively underexplored concept of “Tanah Air” (literally “Land of Water” in Malay) encapsulates the inseparable interplay of two elemental archipelagic forces—“tanah” (land) and “air” (water)—as foundational to Southeast Asian identities and imaginaries. Together and individually, these imaginaries transcend mere alternative political visions. As pluriversal frameworks, they disrupt nationalist ideologies rooted in sedentary, rigid boundaries, functioning as contested yet generative sites of cultural reformation and belonging, emphasizing fluidity, relationality, and multiplicity as core features of regional identity and literary production.

By integrating imaginaries such as the Nanyang, Nusantara, and Tanah Air as critical analytical frameworks, scholars can move beyond instrumentalised paradigms that, within the Malaysian context, tend to isolate Anglophone and Sinophone literatures and scholarship into separate disciplinary silos. Instead, adopting comparative translingual approaches fosters bridges across these literatures through an emphasis on movement, interconnectedness, and relationality. Such methodologies not only facilitate a more expansive understanding of literary cultures but also dismantle epistemic hierarchies grounded in racialised differences, opening pathways toward more inclusive and transformative futures for literary identity and cultural expression.

This mode of relational thinking and imaginative praxis resonates closely with Mignolo’s notion of “delinking” from hegemonic Eurocentric frameworks and knowledge systems that perpetuate colonial legacies of exclusion and marginalisation. By affirming alternative epistemologies rooted in pluriversality, equity, and justice, these comparative frameworks disrupt ethnolinguistic divisions and reorient Malaysian literature within broader Global South dialogues on plurilingualism, translocality, and decoloniality. In doing so, they not only challenge the political and cultural fragmentation of Malaysia’s literary field but also actively contribute to reimagining its place within interconnected, transregional, and postcolonial literary landscapes.

Such delinking efforts, especially those contesting monolingual hegemonies, must extend beyond academic spheres to actively engage literary communities, translation initiatives, and policy reforms that prioritise and celebrate multilingualism while fostering vibrant regional cultural exchange. Advocating for translation frameworks that are deeply attuned to Malaysia’s rich plurilingualism and translocal connectivities is essential for bridging entrenched linguistic divides and cultivating mutual understanding. Moreover, collaborative engagements among scholars of Sinophone, Anglophone, Tamil, and Malay literatures are crucial for reclaiming agency over how Malaysian literature is theorised both locally and globally.

Ultimately, the decolonial “comparative imagination” emerging from the Global South facilitates discourse that transcends narrow binaries of centrism and marginality. It embraces dynamic networks of fluidity, linguistic diversity, and cultural heterogeneity as the very foundation of cultural production. By centring plurilingualism and relationality, the Nanyang and its allied imaginaries emerge as powerful conceptual lenses to mobilise the vast, untapped possibilities inherent in a newly configured Malaysian literary community — one that is unapologetically pluriversal. At the same time, this reimagining contributes vitally to broader global conversations on transnationalism and decoloniality within Southeast Asian literatures, advancing a critical praxis that is rigorously local and boldly transregional in scope and impact.