Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:38:24.804Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Transcultural Aesthetics and Postcolonial Memory: the Practices and Politics of Remembering in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Angelia Poon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The tension between the use of postcolonial memory to bear witness to the past and the aestheticization of memory lies at the center of Malaysian-born writer Tan Twan Eng’s second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), a work that features the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II and the postwar period of the Malayan Emergency. The main protagonist is a former judge named Yun Ling who, faced with the prospect of eventual memory and speech loss, is moved to record her past experiences including the time she was a prisoner of war interred and when she was an apprentice to the gardener, Aritomo. In this article, I examine the novel’s self-conscious musings about the nature of memory and the ways in which memory may be represented and preserved. Tan’s novel attempts to provide a meditation on the transcultural mediation and aestheticization of memory by deliberately intermingling and overlaying various cultural features, artistic traditions and ethno-cultural subjectivities when it comes to processes of remembering. The attempt to transculturally aestheticize memory is on one level a metafictional and ostensibly inclusive move to affirm the plurality of stories and multiple perspectives. Yet, this is undermined by the novel’s very strategies of aestheticization, which run the risk of making memory an artistic object so “precious” and rarefied as to counter the more avowedly political function of memory—that of bearing witness to history.

Keywords

transcultural aestheticsmemorytransnational literaturepostcolonial MalaysiaTan Twan Eng
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 185 - 201
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Antoinette, Michelle. “The Art of Race: Rethinking Malaysian Identity through the Art of Wong Hoy Cheong.” In Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, 191–212. Edited by Daniel P. S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden, and Gaik Cheng Khoo. New York: Routledge, 2009.Google Scholar
Ashcroft, Bill. “Towards a postcolonial aesthetics.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.4 (2015): 410–421.Google Scholar
Boehmer, Elleke. “A Postcolonial Aesthetic: Repeating upon the Present.” In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, 170–181. Edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh. New York: Routledge, 2010.Google Scholar
Craps, Stef. “Wor(l)ds of grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Textual Practice 24.1 (2010): 51–68.Google Scholar
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders.” In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, 899–941. Edited by David Nicholls. New York: MLA, 2006.Google Scholar
Gui, Weihsin. National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics: Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Holden, Philip. “Global Malaysian Novels: Prospects and Possibilities.” Kajian Malaysia 30.1 (2012): 47–59.Google Scholar
Jaswal, Balli Kaur. Inheritance. Collingwood: Sleepers Publishing, 2013.Google Scholar
Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Lim, David. “Agency and the Pedagogy of Japanese Colonialism in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain.” Critique 52.2 (2011): 233–247.Google Scholar
Loh, Vyvyane. Breaking the Tongue. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014.Google Scholar
McLeod, John. “Sounding Silence: Transculturation and Its Thresholds.” Transnational Literature 4.1 (2011): 1–13. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html. 3 September 3, 2015.Google Scholar
Rothberg, Michael. “Preface: Beyond Tancred and Clorinda: Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects.” In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies, xi–xviii. Edited by Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2014.Google Scholar
Rothberg, Michael..“Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies 359–379. Edited by Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Samarasan, Preeta. Evening Is the Whole Day. London: Fourth Estate, 2008.Google Scholar
Schulze-Engler, Frank and Helff, Sissy, eds. Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.Google Scholar
Tan, Twan Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Myrmidon Books, 2012.Google Scholar
Young, Robert. “Postcolonial Remains.” New Literary History 43.1 (2012): 19–42.Google Scholar