Novelization as Postcolonial Self-Fashioning: Lee Kok Liang’sLondon Does Not Belong to Me

Abstract

This article exemplifies a mode of analysis in which the novel is read as a practice of self-making under decolonization. The argument is illustrated through attention to Lee Kok Liang’s novel London Does Not Belong to Me. Written describing Lee’s experiences as a Malayan law student in London in the 1950s, the novel was published posthumously in Malaysia fifty years later. Comparison of the published text with Lee’s journal of his student days enables a careful study of the process of the novelization of the self as an example of larger processes of subjectification through authorship in the process of decolonization, and in the creation of elite citizen-subjects in the nation-state of Malaya and its successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.