Papers by Shanthini Pillai
The Southeast Asian Review, May 12, 2017
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2021
This paper engages with the aspects of discursive hegemony in terms of both Metropolitan and disc... more This paper engages with the aspects of discursive hegemony in terms of both Metropolitan and disciplinary position and privilege, using the sociology of the language that has been produced on Malaysian Indian identity as my point of reference. It contends that these observations and articulations are able to rise to the surface more easily when they are securely located within disciplinary domains often related to determinacy. I argue that viewed as a whole, it becomes apparent that these discourses are coloured by the subjective desire of the accumulation of knowledge on the subject matters of their writings. As such, they are as much stories that are told of the Malaysian Indian community as those found in literary narratives and can ultimately lead to unequal discursivities.
An International Journal of Asian Literatures, Cultures and Englishes, 2010
The task of teaching literature (in English) to Malaysian tertiary students is often fraught with... more The task of teaching literature (in English) to Malaysian tertiary students is often fraught with difficulties. Challenges range from dealing with a majority of learners with little competence in the English language, much less analytical reading and writing skills. However, literature taught and learnt effectively can pave the way towards the development of multiple literacy skills especially as it is known to be an effective tool in generating multicultural awareness and communication skills in learners. This article will demonstrate the ways in which the latter can be achieved through the incorporation of popular television series and music in literature courses. It will show how popular television series as well as popular songs can be used as captivating tools to channel an understanding of key issues and terms crucial to literary studies that can prove to be far more successful than when teaching and learning is based merely on literary texts alone. The article concludes that ...
Social Sciences and Missions, 2021
In this paper, I focus on the influence of the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris (MEP) on ... more In this paper, I focus on the influence of the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris (MEP) on the performative poetics of Christian faith and citizenship among Malaysian Catholics. Using the central trope of the house, both in its general context of home and dwelling, and its Christian context of the church as a house of worship, I specifically show how cross-border movements, through intersections of individual, material, and cultural mobility stretching across centuries have led to synekistic practices of subject formation in the religious sphere. In this way the paper interjects into discourses on conflict between Christianity and the state and highlights alternative notes of interdependencies and creative synergies.
While there in an exhaustive list of literature produced by diasporic South Asian writers that vo... more While there in an exhaustive list of literature produced by diasporic South Asian writers that voices a multitude of concerns for both men and women of this descent, the voice that speaks to the South Asian young adult needs to be highlighted and explored in detail. This is especially crucial as the majority of metropolitan young adult texts are largely Eurocentric in nature. Novels with themes that appeal to a young reader with subject matter consistent with the age, experiences and challenges of the young adult and with a young non-white protagonist are rare. This paper introduces a South Asian Diasporic Metropolitan Young Adult text to investigate how it can interpolate into the consciousness of the Metropolitan diasporic South Asian young reader as well as into the western narrative space. This is done by focusing on the ways in which South Asian elements of place, history, and allegory interpolate into the narrative space of Tanuja Desai Hidier’s young adult novel, Born Confu...
Reading Malaysian Literature in English, 2021
Editoriale. Oltre la pandemia di Augusto Balloni pag. 4 L'impatto della crisi pandemica da Covid-... more Editoriale. Oltre la pandemia di Augusto Balloni pag. 4 L'impatto della crisi pandemica da Covid-19 sulla popolazione geriatrica di Andrea Fabbo e Angela Mancini pag. 6
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 1, 2014
Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 2020
Kritika Kultura, 2012
For a very long time, when diaspora was the focus of Malaysian writings in English, the tendency ... more For a very long time, when diaspora was the focus of Malaysian writings in English, the tendency was to highlight the experience of the classic diaspora-the migrant Chinese and Indian communities who left their ancestral homeland to settle in Malaya. Over time, however, there
Kritika Kultura, 2019
Traditionally seen as a discipline that was immersed in published narratives, with poetry, drama,... more Traditionally seen as a discipline that was immersed in published narratives, with poetry, drama, short fiction, and novels as the sole determinant corpus, Literary Studies in the twenty-first century has progressed across the latitudes of narrativity, as the notion of text itself has pushed past established boundaries of words on a published page. The page in the contemporary context can be taken to mean the written text, the visual text, the moving text, and the hypertext, to name just a few. The articles in this Forum Kritika present a glimpse into the shifting frontiers in Literary Studies as it presents varied facets of contemporary literary scholarship by literary scholars. The discussions take us across a number of planes. They integrate both print and multimodal texts, demonstrate eclectic frameworks of reading that cross disciplinary boundaries, reveal the utilization of analytical tools from the hard sciences, and also project the inculcation of innovative and entrepreneurial skills in the literary classroom. Yet, the Forum is also mindful that however far away we trek beyond established frontiers, we must still ensure our contact with the core of our discipline, that of traditional forms of the printed text. For, if we dismiss them from our view, we run the risk of inadvertently devaluing the worth of literary fiction and its attendant academic scholarship. As such, the Forum also incorporates articles that engage with contemporary theater and novels and their inherent validity in reflecting the socio-political concerns of our world, emphasizing that these will never lose their currency however much the arena changes.
Kritika Kultura, 2019
Studies have shown that accented filmmaking features and strategies are indeed appearing in wide-... more Studies have shown that accented filmmaking features and strategies are indeed appearing in wide-ranging films of contemporary cinemas. The main focus of this paper is to analyze Viduthalai Moochu, an internal exilic Eelam-Tamil film from Sri Lanka, using a concept derived from Hamid Naficy's theorization of An Accented Cinema known as the "preoccupation with the place. " The concept is cinematically expressed through the open, closed, and third spacetime cinematic formations. It needs to be noted here that Naficy's theory offers a range of accented cinematic features that express accent in the film. However, the paper will only focus on the film's spatial representations that are configured according to the space-time formations. Space-time formations are cinematic features that are employed to produce and reproduce the "accent" through cinematic representations of spaces and places rendered in the film. The configurations of the space-time formations will be used as the basis to examine Viduthalai Moochu, a film that does not seem to demonstrate the familiar conventions of filmmaking. The film mainly grapples with themes that enunciate the Eelam-Tamil displacement and deterritorialization in the internal exilic situation. The analysis shows how a particular version of alternative filmmaking strategy exclusively uses spatial representations to render themes
International Journal of Asian Christianity, 2018
This article examines the emergence of the Catholic Church in Malaysia and Singapore in the moder... more This article examines the emergence of the Catholic Church in Malaysia and Singapore in the modern period through an exploration of the Apostolic Vicariate of Western Siam (1841–1888). The establishment of this Catholic institution—a temporary territorial jurisdiction in missionary regions that precedes the creation of new dioceses—was key to advancing the transition of the Church from its older colonial model towards a modern national Church. Focusing on the work conducted by French missionaries of the Missions Étrangères de Paris (mep) over these five decades, we analyze the process of developing a local clergy and setting up the socio-cultural scaffolding of the contemporary Catholic Church in the Malay Peninsula. We pay special attention to how mep missionaries skilfully navigated their missionary activities through encounters with Malay rulers and British colonial officers to secure the creation of a Catholic elite independent of the Portuguese Padroado. Our argument suggests t...
The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2017
This paper explores the dynamics of the modern Asian Catholic ecclesiastical experience in Malays... more This paper explores the dynamics of the modern Asian Catholic ecclesiastical experience in Malaysia within the context of diaspora. Using the South Indian Tamil Catholic community in Malaysia as a case in point, I explore the mediations that occur in ecclesiastical spaces as a result of the points of contact between Catholic Tamil Nadu and its diaspora in Malaysia. Through an analysis of two festivals of ethnic Tamil heritage, the Feast of Our Lady of Good Health and the Pongal Festival, in a predominantly Tamil parish community, the discussion will show how the interactions between ethnicity, culture, and the Catholic Tamil diaspora in Malaysia foreground a sinuous interweaving of the threads of continuity, adaptation and dialogue. I also attempt to extend the investigation a little further to show instances of subtle differences that emerge as a result of the diasporic relocation of vernacular Catholicism inherited from South India. The latter subsequently reveal the modern Asian ecclesiastical interconnections that occur as South Indian Catholicism is practised within its national Malaysian Catholic context.
Diaspora, 2017
Abstract:This article presents a glimpse into the literary writings emanating from a community th... more Abstract:This article presents a glimpse into the literary writings emanating from a community that has, at best, remained at the margins of global South Asian diasporic literary scholarship: that of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia. It begins with a brief historical overview of the Malaysian Indian community together with an overview and cartography of Malaysian Indian writings. It then develops a comparative analysis of the representation of an issue quite central to Malaysian Indian identity politics, that of caste and class, in two novels: The Return by K.S. Maniam, an established Malaysian writer, and Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan, the newest writer to emerge from this community. The ultimate aim of this article is to show that if one steps closer to the canvas and look deeper at the representations of the community in literary texts that contextualize and individualize the Malaysian Indian experience, then intra-ethnic heterogeneity and conflicts within the diasporic community, as well as the forms of subaltern positioning, become visible, and they insistently reveal that such a community is as heterogeneous as its global counterparts.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011
The dynamics of globalization and digitization are not only shaping a new media order but also ma... more The dynamics of globalization and digitization are not only shaping a new media order but also making significant impacts on the cultural dimensions of an older societal order in the case of the Tamil Diaspora. The emerging transnational phenomenon of Tamil television challenges constructed boundaries, contests traditionally homogenized spaces such as those of nation and homeland, questions the principle of territoriality and opens up the sphere both from without and within the national space. New media practices and flows are shaping media spaces with a built-in transnational connectivity, creating contemporary cultures pregnant with new meanings and experiences. This article aims to map the developments around transnational Tamil television. It scrutinizes the nature and impact of Tamil media emerging from Singapore and Malaysia on other parts of the diasporic Tamil world, and also alternatively, the nature and effect of Tamil media from India and elsewhere in Singapore and Malays...
Kajian Malaysia, 2016
In this paper, we seek to investigate the place that local literature has been given in Malaysian... more In this paper, we seek to investigate the place that local literature has been given in Malaysian Education in the English Language Subject for Secondary Schools in Malaysia. We argue that literature engenders a space for the nation to share in the experiences and feelings of groups and situations that might never be encountered directly. It often engages with the realities of a nation through diverse constructions of its history, its realities and communal relations. As such we posit that literature can be a significant tool to study the realities of Malaysian nationhood and its constructions of inter-ethnic relationships, and ultimately, an effective tool to forge nation building. The discussion focuses on investigating the role that literature has played in Malaysian education in the context of engaging with ethnically diverse Malaysian learners and whether text selection has prioritised ethnic diversity in its Malaysian context. Samples used for discussion centre on literature in English in Malaysian Education. The paper concludes that more attention needs to be paid to the inclusion of local literature as it can be an important communicator of signifiers of ethnic identity and subsequently play an important role in facilitating inter-ethnic engagement and understanding in Malaysian schools.
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Papers by Shanthini Pillai