Fiction and Faction in the Malay World

This book offers a variety of essays and perspectives on some of the foreigners and traders who came to the Malay World and wrote fiction and faction (writing that portrays real people or events in a dramatised manner) during their sojourn - regardless of whether they continued to stay in the region, returned to their home country, or migrated to another country. The essays tend to cross generic and disciplinary boundaries as the contributors of this book are drawn from various fields within the arts and humanities, including history, geography, language and literature and translation. All of them, however, deal with colonial texts, the Malay World, or primarily cover the period from the 18th to the 20th century. Including readings of fiction, diaries, vignettes, letters written by traders or colonial officers, the uniqueness of this book lies in the personal, private and/or informal nature of the various documents studied. The encounters of these 'outsiders' with the 'natives' not only offer fascinating historical insights into the Malay World, but, to a significant degree, vividly express the views and personalities of the writers themselves, as mediated through their assigned commercial and colonial roles.

Dr Mohamad Rashidi Pakri (BA (Hons), University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA; MA, Universiti Sains Malaysia; PhD, University of Malaya) is a Senior Lecturer of English at the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia. His major research interest is in colonial history and literature. Among his publications are From Alien into Colonial Space: An Imperialist’s Adventure in Clifford’s Since the Beginning in Exploring Space: Trends in Literature, Linguistics and Translation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), Treasure from the Colonial Past: The Reading of Sir Frank Swettenham’s Short Stories ’A Silhouette’ and ’A Mezzotint’ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) and An Imperial or a Personal Legacy: The Rivalry of W. E. Maxwell and F. A. Swettenham in British Malaya in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 84, Part 2 (2011). Prof. Arndt Graf (PhD, Hamburg, 1998) has been the Chair of Southeast Asian Studies at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt, Germany, since 2009. Previously, he served at Universiti Sains Malaysia (2007-2009) and the University of Hamburg (1999-2006). He also held visiting positions at Cornell University, the Jakarta Islamic State University and the University of La Rochelle. Arndt Graf’s publications mostly cover aspects of rhetoric, media, and political communication in insular Southeast Asia.