• Corpus ID: 190332632

SELF-REFASHIONING A PLURAL SOCIETY: DIALOGISM AND SYNCRETISM IN MALAYSIAN POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE

@inproceedings{Quayum2007SELFREFASHIONINGAP,
  title={SELF-REFASHIONING A PLURAL SOCIETY: DIALOGISM AND SYNCRETISM IN MALAYSIAN POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE},
  author={Mohammad A. Quayum},
  year={2007}
}

• M. Quayum
• Published 2007
• Art

In “The American Scholar,” one of the earliest of post-colonial works by the American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is also widely credited as the founder of modern, post-independence American literature, the writer pleaded for creative thinking and creative negotiations. He urged the American scholar to be both original and inclusivist in the formation of American culture; he must know the past and consider history as “indispensable to a wise man” (566), and yet he must not allow his soul to be subordinated by the past or pinned down by history, for a scholar is “Man Thinking” (565); he ought to be progressive, innovative and futuristic; his function is to envision the unknown and the unborn by sustaining his sensibility on the present and the bygone. 2 This spirit of dialogism and syncretism, of keeping one eye on history and casting the other towards the future; of harnessing and negotiating past, present and future; between the alien and the inherent, the imported and the indigenous, in order to forge and fashion a new self and nation, is what occupies much of Malaysian post-colonial literature. The writers of this tradition are not necessarily reactive or resistant to imperial cultures and colonial history, nor do they act as abiding champions of indigeneity and the autochthonous, but their imagination is defined by a sense of undulation,