Joshua Tee is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Pennsylvannia State University and is Vice President of Graduates in International Languages and Literatures at PSU. Tee is working on magical realism from the Global South, archipelagic studies (especially in the context of the Malay Archipelago), global indigeneity, and digital humanities. Tee will be giving a talk on Malaysian poet Muhammad Haji Salleh titled “‘I am an Islander:’ Archipelagic Identity in Muhammad Haji Salleh’s Beyond the Archipelago.” at the UC Berkeley-UCLA Conference on Southeast Asian Studies in April 2023.
Abstract: Despite the deep historical interrelation between Malay literature and speculative fiction, the English short story anthology Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore (2021) remains a rare example of contemporary speculative fiction written by Malay Singaporeans. In two of the short stories — Diana Rahim’s “Transgression” and Noridah Kamari’s “Second Shadow” — shadows assume an agency independent of their creators. While the shadows can and should be read as part of the larger ritualistic reinterpretations occurring in “Transgression” and the critique of state censorship in “Second Shadow,” I propose that the presence of these shadows enable an insightful conversation with psychoanalytic conceptualizations of psyche, repression, and anti-duality, especially through engagements with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Shadow-Beast” and Carl Jung’s “shadow integration.” Through this conversation, I argue that the shadowy presences in “Transgression” and “Second Shadow” point to speculative subjectivities that complicate both stable notions of identity and the psychoanalytic frameworks that have historically attempted to destabilize them. Specifically, the elements of speculative fiction in Singa-Pura-Pura facilitate a re-reading of the shadow as an agentic, semi-material form of repression that must continuously be read as simultaneously independent of, and indistinguishable from, the protagonist’s own identity. The agency and materiality of psychic repression that exists in the two narratives, in turn, advance novel ways of approaching Singaporean discourses on race, state and selfhood. Finally, I step back to consider Singa-Pura-Pura as an anthology of speculative subjectivities, including AI subjectivities and interspecies subjectivities, and I consider how its meditations on subjectivity can inform future readings of speculative fiction.