The Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (IAS @ UBD) is pleased to announce the publication of the latest volume in the IAS/Springer “Asia in Transition” Series: Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives edited by Zawawi Ibrahim, Gareth Richards, and Victor T. King.
Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. Taking an inclusive cultural studies perspective, it questions the ideological narrative of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ that dominates explanations of conflicts and cleavages in the Malaysian context.
The contributions are organised in the following three broad themes:
‘Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexities and Hybridities’ takes a range of empirical studies—literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation—to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities.
‘Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses’ deals with counter-hegemonic social movements—of antiracism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing—that explicitly seek to open up greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity.
‘Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media’ provides a close textual reading of some exemplars of new cultural and media practices found in personal testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative.
This book is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of identity and nationhood in Malaysia, and for those with wider interests in the fields of critical cultural studies and discourse analysis.
To view the table of contents of this volume, please visit the Springer/IAS “Asia in Transition” Series website.
Zawawi Ibrahim, Gareth Richards, Victor T. King, eds. (2021). Discourses, agency an identity in Malaysia: critical perspectives. Singapore, Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3
Information about the other titles in the IAS/Springer – Asia in Transition series can be found here.
