"Why aren't you a Muslim?"Pride and prejudice through Gunawan Mahmood's teen fiction
This essay examines the role of the dominant Malay intelligentsia in imagining Malaysia, using as platform for discussion two contemporary teen novels by Gunawan Mahmood: This Land (originally published in Malay as Tanah Ini in 1996; out in English translation in 2002) and Namaku Ayoko (My Name is A...
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| Format: | Book Section |
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Brill
2008
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| Online Access: | https://library.oum.edu.my/repository/577/ |
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| Summary: | This essay examines the role of the dominant Malay intelligentsia in imagining Malaysia, using as platform for discussion two contemporary teen novels by Gunawan Mahmood: This Land (originally published in Malay as Tanah Ini in 1996; out in English translation in 2002) and Namaku Ayoko (My Name is Ayoko; 1994). The chosen author and texts are little known outside of the Malay literary world, which alters not the fact that Gunawan is a multiple award-winning, state-affiliated writer who, like many of his Malay-Muslim contemporaries and predecessors, believes that “those with knowledge ought to write” and “literature should educate, awaken and inspire society” (in Mahmood, 1993:x). Gunawan is an ‘intellectual’ insofar as he participates in the production and distribution of knowledge, as someone who professes a vocation for the art of “representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” (Said, 1996:11). (Text by author)
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