Reading Malaysian Literature in English

Mohammad A. Quayum is a veteran critic of Malaysian Anglophone literature with thirteen books and numerous articles on the subject to his credit. He has also published extensively on such leading American and South Asian writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Saul Bellow. After teaching for over four decades at universities in Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US, he hastily retired from International Islamic University Malaysia in 2020 to return home to Australia because of the pandemic. He is currently Adjunct Professor at Flinders University and the University of South Australia. His latest publications include A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Orient BlackSwan), Festschrift: The Poetry and Poetics of Shirley Geok-lin Lim (in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Stanford University), Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Companion(Cambridge Scholars Publishing), and Tagore, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge).

• Introduction.- “My Country”/ “Our Country”.- Inclusion, Factionalism and the Nation in the Writings of Lloyd Fernando.- Rehabilitating the Historical Landscape.- Detribalising Malaysia.- Ethnicity, Multiculturalism and National Identity in Three Malaysian English Plays.- The NEP and Vision 2020.- Paths Less Trodden.