Beyond the Color Line: Intersectional Considerations in Chuah Guat Eng’s Fiction

• Main Author: Sim, Wai Chew
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: biodiversity; mechanical and organic solidarity (Durkheim); new economic policy; (Malaysia); politics of recognition; postcolonial literature; Southeast Asian writing
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss23/3; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1576/viewcontent/_5BKKv00n23_2014_5D_202.2_Article_Chew.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This essay argues that the work of Malaysian-Chinese author Chuah Guat Eng gives pause to the culturalism that dominates literary analysis. Articulated primarily through identity politics (the politics of recognition), culturalism’s self- understanding keeps at a distance other forms of social justice commitments including class struggle. However, Chuah spotlights their intersectionality in Malaysia and enjoins us to combine the two – to see the native population’s demand for economic parity and rural development as coterminous in some respects with the demands for recognition made by settler communities. In particular, Chuah’s Echoes of Silence (1994) points to the commensurability between socialist principles that underpinned the left-insurgent activities many Malaysian-Chinese joined or supported during the war and immediate post-war, and the social protection principles that underpin post-independence programmes aimed at alleviating poverty. Chuah’s second novel, Days of Change (2010), in turn suggests that shared ecological conservation ideals provide an arena for redistribution and recognition interests to come together in Malaysia, and this again counters the prevailing tendency to prioritize the claims of cultural otherness. To use terms provided by Émile Durkheim, Chuah highlights organic solidarity and downplays mechanical solidarity. In this regard, her fiction rehearses the theoretical insights of Nancy Fraser, who argues cogently that the framing of redistribution and recognition interests as unrelated or dichotomous commitments is problematic. Like Fraser, Chuah urges an expanded interpretive paradigm unsettling that assumed dichotomy. To the extent that postcolonial literary studies lacks such a focus, a new conceptual vocabulary that extends its horizons is needed.