Overview
- Presents Malaysian ecocritical voices anthologized in one dedicated volume
- Highlights innovative ways of reading environmental literatures
- Also includes contributions by practitioners in civil society, conservation, ecology, and urban biodiversity
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Defending the Tanah Air
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- Malaysian environmental literatures
- Postcolonial ecocriticism in Malaysia
- Malaysian natural history
- Ecological and place identities in Malaysia
- Environmental justice and eco-heroism in Malaysia
- Material ecocriticism in Malaysia
- Human-nonhuman relations in Malaysia
- Malaysian climate change narratives
- Malaysian ecomedia
- Sustainability and conservation in Malaysia
- Orang asli and Indigenous knowledge
- Malaysian literature and the Anthropocene
- Slow violence in Malaysian literature
- Indigenous home gardens as text
- Native magic in Malaysian fiction
- Postcolonial indigeneity in Malaysian fiction
- Orangutan conservation in Sarawak
About this book
This collection of essays brings together ecocritical interpretations of Malaysian texts – including fiction, nonfiction, and other media / cultural expressions. It includes original works by environmental activists as well as emerging and established scholars, who collectively analyse various aspects of Malaysian ecological discourse.
The contributors address crucial – and often controversial – topics such as local ecological imaginations, wildlife conservation, overdevelopment, postcolonial ecological identities, biopolitics, nature and sexuality, nature and race, the commodification of nature, nature–culture embodiments and entanglements, human–animal relations, waste and materiality, human and other-than-human agency, toxicity and slow violence, self-representations as well as attitudes towards land, nativity and indigeneity, migrancy and diaspora.
Readers will gain valuable insights into the ways in which environments and ecological relationships are mediated within this national space, while opening up room to theorise beyond its boundaries.Reviews
In response to the increasing destabilisation of nature and culture in Malaysia, contributors draw from concepts of environmental justice, postcolonial critique, ecocritical activism, and more-than-human agency. Through a four-part progression—from ‘Cultivating Multispecies Worlds’ and ‘Mediating Magical Landscapes’ to ‘Encountering Other Ecologies’ and ‘Defending the Tanah Air’—the collection navigates the sciences, humanities, and arts in its exploration of human-land assemblages in Malaysia. Most distinctively, readers encounter uniquely Malay vocabularies, ideas, and traditions—halaman, kampung, semangat, tanah air, among others—that advance key debates in the field of ecocriticism.
Grounded firmly in local contexts, A Malaysian Ecocriticism Reader at the same time develops a global outlook on ecological precarities through interdisciplinary approaches. As the first book-length English-language study of Malaysian ecocriticism, this collection is an important resource for environmental humanists focusing on Southeast Asia and the Global South.”
—John Charles Ryan, Southern Cross University, Australia
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Dr Agnes S. K. Yeow taught at the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, until her retirement. Her research areas encompassed topics related to the environmental humanities, including climate change literature, postcolonial ecocriticism and migrant ecologies.
Wai Liang Tham has a background in English from his postgraduate studies at Universiti Malaya and is currently affiliated with the research department at New Naratif. His creative and nonfiction works have been published in NANG , PR&TA and the Southeast Asian Review of English.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: A Malaysian Ecocriticism Reader
Book Subtitle: Considerations of Nature, Culture, Place and Identities
Editors: Agnes S. K. Yeow, Wai Liang Tham
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9466-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-99-9465-6Published: 17 February 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-99-9468-7Due: 19 March 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-981-99-9466-3Published: 16 February 2024
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 224
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Literature, general, Environmental and Sustainability Education, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Anthropology