CFP: Representing the Feminine: Gender, Identity and Nation in Postcolonial Southeast Asian Literature

Contributions are sought for an edited collection titled “Representing the Feminine: Gender, Identity and Nation in Postcolonial Southeast Asian literature”. The collection will contribute to scholarship on Southeast Asian women in literature by taking a twofold approach to authorship and creation. The collection will examine 1) how women writers imagine and express the grand narratives of nationalism and nationalist ideology in Malaysian, Singaporean, Indonesian, Bruneian and Filipino fiction and 2) how the literatures of these postcolonial Southeast Asian nations imagine and construct femininities in terms of identities (social, cultural, racial and religious).

Questions which chapters might ask include but are not limited to:

·      How do “national” literatures contribute to the transformation in gender identities, roles and relations?

·      How have iconic female characters in national literature influenced “ideal” femininities in the nation space?

·      How have pivotal female figures in the nation space been fictionalized, translated, constructed, in literature?

·      To what extent have national/regional literatures been affected by the global, postmodernist views on gender?

·      How does gender as represented in the literatures of the region affect imagined communities of the nation through the intersections of race, religion, culture, and class?

·      How have literary representations of gender reflected historical changes in the region, or in relation to the nation (state ideology, policies, economic development etc)?

·      How have female writers been critically received/constructed/identified or used within the nation state/national projects?

Chapters should expand on or establish current debates and scholarship on gender and nation in the region, and may focus on individual texts, writers, genres or countries. Cross-genre, cross-cultural, cross-national explorations are also welcome. Explorations of non-traditional literary mediums, including the digital, self-published, transcribed oral literatures, and so on, are encouraged. Texts from any era to present may be considered, individually or in tandem.   

Chapters will be 6,000 to 7,000 words, including all footnotes and references. First drafts are due 1^st March 2015, with final versions on 1^st September 2015.

If interested, a 300 word chapter proposal and a brief CV should be sent to Dr Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud (Kathrina.daud@ubd.edu.bn) by 1^st July 2014. Successful submissions will be notified by 1^st September 2014. Any queries may be directed to the same.

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Dr Kathrina bte DP Haji Mohd Daud
Creative Writing and English Literature
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Universiti Brunei Darussalam