University of Nottingham Malaysia
University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute-Malaysia (UoNARI-M)
     
  

Malaysia in Canada: Penang's influence on Daphne Marlatt

Location
F4A11
Date(s)
13th March 2019
Contact
For more information on the event, kindly e-mail Gaik Cheng Khoo.
Description
This talk examines writer Daphne Marlatt’s relationship to Malaysia alongside the under-examined socio-political resonances between Canada and Malaysia during the 1960s and 1970s. Marlatt is best known in the Canadian literary arts today as a celebrated feminist poet, novelist, playwright, and editor whose experimental poetry in particular has shaped Canadian poetics over the past four decades. Marlatt’s childhood in Penang, Malaysia, is often cited as contributing to her preoccupation with polyvocal and nonconformist approach to language, as well as her early conceptions of cultural plurality that appear in her writing. Her relationship to Malaysia, which she describes as a “phantom limb” of memory, prompted her 1976 return to Penang with her son. Following this, she wrote her long poem “In the Month of Hungry Ghosts” (1979) which examines her early life in Malaysia, as well as the novel Taken (1996), which is set in both Malaysia and Canada.

While Marlatt’s history in Malaysia is read as shaping her aesthetic sensibilities, in this talk, I will analyse this relationship alongside Malaysia’s influences on Canada’s burgeoning multicultural identity, as Canada looked to other nations similarly grappling with ethnic plurality. What is missing from this transnational relationship in readings of Marlatt’s work, I argue, is that the connections between these nations that Marlatt teases out in her work were also present in conversations in the House of Commons in the early 1970s, and even in state discussions about future partnerships with Malaysia and Singapore in the 1960s. I then discuss how Taken imagines a moment where Malaysia’s influence is treated not as  signalling a brief unrealised partnership between nations, but as part of a larger conversation between these sites. 

Details 
Date: 13 March 2019, Wednesday
Time: 15:00 to 16:30
Venue: F4A11
             University of Nottingham Malaysia
             Jalan Broga 43500 Semenyih Selangor Darul Ehsan

About the speaker 
Dr Michelle O’Brien is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Central Washington University & Visiting Fellow at the Transpacific Center for Transpacific Studies (Simon Fraser University). Her teaching & research focuses on Asian North American & Asian diasporic literatures & theory, multiculturalism, comparative raciality,& transpacific studies. She is currently completing a manuscript that examines the connections between multicultural/ multiracial formations in Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, & Australia. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Postcolonial Text, Asiatic, New Global Studies and The Comparatist.  

University of Nottingham Malaysia

Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih
Selangor Darul Ehsan
Malaysia

telephone: +603 8924 8000
fax: +603 8924 8001
email: enquiries@nottingham.edu.my