Title: Glocal Muslim Identity in Southeast Asian Fiction

Speaker: Dr. Kathrina Mohd Daud, lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and CSEAS visiting research scholar

Date: February 20th (Tues.) 16:00 – 18:00, 2018
Venue: Conference room (E107) on the first floor of East building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Moderator: Prof. Hau Caroline, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
Literary representations of cross-cultural romance is a natural nexus for considering issues of postcoloniality, race, gender and sexuality in Southeast Asian fiction. The negotiation of gendered cultural expectations, racial, ethnic and national hierarchies (intra-Asian and Asian-Western), and religious sensibilities in fictional cross-cultural romances throws into relief the fault-lines and clash-points of Southeast Asian identity.

By looking at Habiburrahman El Shirazy’s blockbuster romance, the Indonesian Ayat-ayat Cinta (Verses of Love), Bruneian Norsiah Gapar’s Pengabdian (Submission) and Singaporean Isa Kamari’s critically acclaimed speculative novel Tawassul (Intercession), this paper will consider how the trope of cross-cultural romance has been used to construct a local Muslim identity in these seminal national texts; in particular how the texts have affiliated themselves with a global Muslim community while retaining a national sense of identity.

About the speaker:
Kathrina Mohd Daud graduated with a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester in 2011 and has since been a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). She has previously been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, UK (2013), and the Southeast Asian Studies Center at the University of Washington, USA (2014). She recently co-edited the volume The Southeast Asian Woman Writes Back: Gender, Nation and Identity in the Literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines (Springer, 2017) and works primarily on the intersections of global Muslim fiction, popular fiction, and Southeast Asian literature.