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Transnational re-memorialization in Preeta Samarasan's Evening Is the Whole Day
Citation
Ang, A. (2021). Transnational re-memorialization in Preeta Samarasan's Evening Is The Whole Day. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 57(5), 621-635. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2021.1975406
Abstract
Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day (2008) traces the Rajasekharans’ family history over three generations and re-memorializes the racial riots of May 13, 1969 from a Malaysian Indian perspective. Compared to an earlier phase of memorialization in Malaysia’s national discourse about racial and cultural identity, the novel engages in the process of re-memorialization from a transnational locus, that brings together the material contexts of the Anglo American publishing industry as well as Samarasan’s racialized belonging to her homeland as a mobile Malaysian. This doubly transnational frame is defined by a strong sense of injustice from a revisionist perspective, one that obscures the complex history behind Malaysia’s public discourse on race and reproduces the essentialism of racial categories. The novel’s regressive temporality is also a critique of Malaysia’s non-progression on issues of race, as much as it forecloses other ways of rethinking racialization in Malaysia.
Date Issued
2021
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Journal
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
DOI
10.1080/17449855.2021.1975406