Overcoming Passion for Race in Malaysia Cultural Studies

Lim, David C.L.

doi:10.1163/ej.9789004168152.i-184

Cited by 10 publications

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“…Malaysia makes ample use of racial/ethnic categories which are omnipresent in education, in politics, in media, etc. (Lim, 2008). Pretending to be able to deconstruct one 'foreign' national group in this context may reveal itself to be a Herculean task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing Cultural Stereotypes to Improve International Students' Interculturality

Machart

Azzouz

2016

International Journal of Bias, Identity and Diversities in Education

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Malaysian Pre-France programmes prepare Malaysian students to study at a French university. Students are prepared in intensive language courses, as well as mathematics and science in line with the French curriculum. The teaching staff members include French citizens and other nationals, native and non-native speakers, members of the ethnic minorities from France. Malaysia itself is a multicultural country and highly diverse in terms of language, ethnicity, religion, etc. The authors' expectations were that the convergence of these French-speaking lecturers with students from a ‘culturally' diverse environment would entail a certain form of fluidity in approaching the ‘culture' of the host destination. However, their experiences during the required DELF, a diploma awarded by the French Ministry of Education to prove the French-language skills of non-French candidates, demonstrate that the representations of France remain rather static and ‘traditional'. Such representations generate some anxiety for the students before they travel abroad. In an attempt to evaluate the impact of these representations and the students' readiness to meet ‘culturally different others', the authors conducted a small scale experiment with final semester students who were about to leave for France two months. They first administrated a questionnaire to 21 students for the purpose of revealing the students' latent representations of their host destination. The participants then followed a lecture in order to deconstruct their original representations, and asked to write a report in French on this experiment. Results show that the long-term exposure to ‘visible' diverse speakers has little effect on the participants in terms of moving away from cultural stereotypes, but that a relatively short but explicit intervention has a rather significant impact on the participants' representations. The authors conclude that only a pro-active, deconstructive and explicit course of action can enable learners to move away from widespread stereotypes, and that a fluid intercultural awareness on the part of lecturers is crucial.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing Cultural Stereotypes to Improve International Students' Interculturality

Machart

Azzouz

2016

International Journal of Bias, Identity and Diversities in Education

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Introduction

Chin¹,

Daud²

2017

The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back

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Mobility as Memory: Refiguring Temporal and Spatial Mobility in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain

Ang

2022

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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This article discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.

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Overcoming Passion for Race in Malaysia Cultural Studies

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Deconstructing Cultural Stereotypes to Improve International Students' Interculturality

Deconstructing Cultural Stereotypes to Improve International Students' Interculturality

Introduction

Mobility as Memory: Refiguring Temporal and Spatial Mobility in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain

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