Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:15:00.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Novelization as Postcolonial Self-Fashioning: Lee Kok Liang’s London Does Not Belong to Me

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2020

Philip Holden Open the ORCID record for Philip Holden [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article exemplifies a mode of analysis in which the novel is read as a practice of self-making under decolonization. The argument is illustrated through attention to Lee Kok Liang’s novel London Does Not Belong to Me. Written describing Lee’s experiences as a Malayan law student in London in the 1950s, the novel was published posthumously in Malaysia fifty years later. Comparison of the published text with Lee’s journal of his student days enables a careful study of the process of the novelization of the self as an example of larger processes of subjectification through authorship in the process of decolonization, and in the creation of elite citizen-subjects in the nation-state of Malaya and its successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.

Keywords

noveldecolonizationSingaporeMalaysiaLondonself-fashioningLee Kok Liang
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 24 - 38
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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

2. Lee’s journal is preserved as two separate incomplete typescripts in the Syd Harrex Collection, Flinders University Library Special Collections. The typescripts are catalogued as 1952 Journal 1, and 1952 Journal 2, respectively, and neither appears to be the original typescript Lee presented to Harrex. Given possible confusion, I have not given page numbers in references, but I have used Journal 1 as my copy text, and supplemented it with Journal 2 for the final section, which is missing from Journal 1.

3. Parry, Benita, “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 40.1 (2009): 27–55, esp. 34.Google Scholar

4. Wilson, for instance, sees the displacement and alienation in the novel as part of a necessary apprenticeship for a postcolonial writer. Quayum acclaims Lee retrospectively as the “founder of Malaysian fiction in English.” See Wilson, Bernard, “Submerging Pasts in London Does Not Belong to Me ,” in London Does Not Belong to Me, by Liang, Lee Kok (Petaling Jaya: Maya Press, 2003): 313–33Google ScholarPubMed; Quayum, M. A., “A Malaysian Existentialist Story: Lee Kok Liang,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 40.2 (2004): 136 (https://doi.org/10.1080/17449850408589401).Google Scholar

5. McLeod, John, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Collins, Norman, London Belongs to Me (London: Gollancz, 1945)Google Scholar; see also London Belongs to Me, directed by Sidney Gilliat (London: Individual Pictures, 1948).

7. Berman, Bruce, “Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya ,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 30.3 (1996): 311–44, esp. 331.Google Scholar

8. Berman, “Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography,” 338.

9. Gikandi, Simon, “Cultural Translation and the African Self: A (Post)Colonial Case Study,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3.3 (2001): 355–75, esp. 357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Gikandi, “Cultural Translation and the African Self,” 359, 370.

11. Boehmer, Elleke, “The Hero’s Story: The Male Leader’s Autobiography and the Syntax of Postcolonial Nationalism,” in Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 66–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holden, Philip, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).Google Scholar

12. Bruner, Jerome, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 54.Google Scholar

13. Terretta, Meredith, “Anti-Colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 52.3 (2017): 448–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Bruner, Jerome, Acts of Meaning (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1990), 116.Google Scholar

15. Phelan’s intervention in Narrative was a response to an ongoing debate raised by the popularity of Eakin’s work, and in particular Galen Strawson’s article “Against Narrativity,” which argued against the notion of a narrative self. Although Phelan’s article is a useful introduction to the debate it, like Strawson’s article, uses a single quotation from Bruner, radically simplifying the psychologist’s position and neglecting his continual stress on sociocultural context. See Phelan, James, “Editor’s Column,” Narrative 13.3 (2005): 205–10Google Scholar, and Strawson, Galen, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17 (2004): 428–52.Google Scholar

16. Bruner, Jerome, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1986), 8.Google Scholar

17. Bruner, Jerome, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 71.3 (2004): 691–710, esp. 699.Google Scholar

18. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, 26.

19. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 107.

20. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 110.

21. Bruner, Jerome, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21, esp. 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Stockwell, Anthony, “‘The Crucible of the Malayan Nation’: The University and the Making of a New Malaya, 1938–62,” Modern Asian Studies 43.5 (2009): 1163–179 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X08003752).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Darian-Smith, Kate and Waghorne, James, “Australian-Asian Sociability, Student Activism, and the University Challenge to White Australia in the 1950s,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 62.2 (2016): 203–18, esp. 208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Quoted in Barnes, John, “The Loneliness of Living in English: An Appreciation of Lee Kok Liang,” in London Was Full of Rooms, ed. Barnett, Tully, et al. (Adelaide: Lythrum Press, 2006): 14–26, esp. 19.Google Scholar

25. Barnes, “The Loneliness of Living in English,” 21.

26. For evidence of stories Lee was working on in London, see Kit McMahon, letter to Lee Kok Liang, January 20, 1953, Syd Harrex Collection, Flinders.

27. Barnes, “The Loneliness of Living in English,” 24–25.

28. Ratnam, S. Raja [Sinnathamby Rajaratnam], “The Changing Malay People,” Asia 42.8 (August 1942): 449.Google Scholar

29. Ratnam, S. Raja [Sinnathamby Rajaratnam], “Malaya’s Three Peoples,” Asia and the Americas 46.1 (October 1946): 452.Google Scholar

30. “Lawyer’s Work for Malayan Students: Communism Denial,” Daily Telegraph, November 16, 1953.

31. Information regarding surveillance of Malayan students in London in the 1940s and 1950s can be found in a number of Colonial Office file series in the National Archives of the UK (TNA), Kew, Surrey, United Kingdom. In addition to those cited following, C O1022/197 Malayan Students in the United Kingdom is of particular interest.

32. Swee, Goh Keng, “The Dilemma of the Malays in Malaya,” Suara Merdeka 2.1 (January/March 1951): 5.Google Scholar

33. J. L. Keith, Note dated June 29, 1951, CO 717/193 “Voice of Freedom”: “Suara Merdeka,” TNA.

34. R.L. Baxter, Note dated December 3, 1953, CO 1022/196 Activities of the Malayan Forum and the Publication “Suara Merdeka,” TNA.

35. Barnes, “The Loneliness of Living in English”; Lee Kok Liang, letter to J. Nehru, March 1, 1951, Syd Harrex Collection, Flinders.

36. Carey, A. T., Colonial Students: A Study of the Social Adaptation of Colonial Students in London (London: Secker & Warburg, 1956), 245 Google Scholar. Baker, Maurice, The Accidental Diplomat: The Autobiography of Maurice Baker (Singapore: World Scientific, 2014), 50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hedwig Anuar, oral history interview, July 21–26, 1998, National Archives of Singapore (NAS), Fort Canning, Singapore, accession no. 002036/44.

37. Carey, Colonial Students, 40.

38. For example, C. G. Lim, letter, Hujan Mas: A Malayan Students’ Union Publication 1.6 (July 1955): 2.

39. C. G. Lim, Hujan Mas, 2.

40. Baker, The Accidental Diplomat, 66.

41. Confidential note from J. J. Paskin to J. D. Higham, May 20, 1950, CO 717/195, Malay Information Agency in London: Charter for Malaya House, TNA.

42. Lee Khoon Choy, oral history interview, February 1, 1981, National Archives of Singapore (NAS), Fort Canning, Singapore, accession no. 000022.

43. Anuar, oral history interview.

44. Baker, The Accidental Diplomat, 44.

45. Baker, The Accidental Diplomat, 50.

46. J. Jolly Dee, “Blonde and Brunette Hunting,” Suara Merdeka 2.1 (January/March 1951): 20.

47. Dee, “Blonde and Brunette Hunting,” 19, 20.

48. “Nonya,” “For Women Only,” Suara Merdeka (January/June 1952): 12.

49. Jameson, Fredric, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88, esp. 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 56–59.

51. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 59.

52. Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 7.Google Scholar

53. Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 18.

54. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5.Google Scholar

55. Liang, Lee Kok, London Does Not Belong to Me (Petaling Jaya: Maya Press, 2003), 15.Google ScholarPubMed

56. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 58.

57. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 167.

58. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 286.

59. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 28.

60. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 94.

61. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 43.

62. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 12.

63. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 25.

64. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 41.

65. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 77.

66. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 247.

67. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 247.

68. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 271.

69. Goh, Daniel P. S. and Holden, Philip, “Introduction: Postcoloniality, Race and Multiculturalism,” in Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, eds. Goh, Daniel P. S., Gabrielpillai, Matilda, Holden, Philip, and Khoo, Gaik Cheng (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009): 1–16, esp. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 22.

71. Bruner, Jerome, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 70.Google Scholar

72. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 51.

73. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 52.

74. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 123.

75. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 88.

76. Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 20.

77. Lee, London Does Not Belong to Me, 286.

78. The phrase is drawn from Lee’s speech at his press conference on August 9, 1965, announcing Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. See Lee Kuan Yew, “Transcript of a Press Conference by the Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, at the Broadcasting House, Singapore, at 12.00 p.m. on Monday, August, 9, 1965,” NAS (https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19650809b.pdf).

79. Lee Kuan Yew, “Transcript of Speech Made by the Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, at Queenstown Community Centre on 10th August, 1966,” NAS (http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19660810.pdf).

80. Goh, Daniel P. S., “Elite Schools, Postcolonial Chineseness and Hegemonic Masculinities in Singapore,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 36.1 (2015): 137–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

81. See Naruse, Cheryl Narumi and Gui, Weihsin, “Singapore and the Intersections of Neoliberal Globalization and Postcoloniality,” Interventions 18.4 (2016): 473–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82. Maniam, K. S., “Introduction,” in London Does Not Belong to Me, by Liang, Lee Kok (Petaling Jaya: Maya Press, 2003), 7, 8.Google Scholar

83. Maniam, “Introduction,” 8.