UNSEEN HISTORIES, MARGINAL IDENTITIES: FIGURES OF THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN BODY IN NEW FICTIONS

Abstract

Three new works of Southeast Asian literary fictions, published within the last decade, investigate the place of the body in new elucidations of national histories and futures. The first chapter focalises the historical past in Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan’s translated text Beauty is a Wound (2015), and argues that the unexcavated trauma of Indonesian history is carefully negotiated through the grotesque body. In which case, national trauma can now be made graphically real, acknowledged, interrogated – and finally, claimed. The second chapter works to claim a desired future in Singaporean writer JY Yang’s speculative novellas The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune work to claim a desired future. It argues that a queer futurity is mediated through a harmonious body. In the process, implicit operations of transformation are surmised to claim future becomings of a cosmopolitan self. Finally, these new literary fictions parlay the corporeal form of the body, in its materialisation of the abstract, ephemeral themes of history and the future, into the locus from which larger local and regional imaginations can be realised.