Abstract
Imagined histories draw their own boundaries, and yet these boundaries are simultaneously challenged through the articulation of their relation to larger networks that exist beyond their peripheries. Critics have questioned the limitations and implications of studying representations of histories and cultures against a globalized, cosmopolitan backdrop. Asia and the Historical Imagination is preoccupied with two types of boundaries. Geographical boundaries provide a broad-spectrum view that privileges similar historical experiences of a group of countries in close proximity. These boundaries are also shaped by cultural, socio-political, and economic imperatives. Strategic boundaries, having to do with political and ideological exigencies, are also significant as the contributors in this volume trace imagined pasts and examine how they diverge and converge, or even clash, in response to contemporary anxieties and ambitions that are influenced by regional or global power relations. Instead of focusing on the “export” of fictional narratives as a means to represent histories and cultures, Asia and the Historical Imagination considers historical fiction more introspectively and explores how relationships among community, nation, and region can help explicate the reading of the local alongside the global.
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Notes
- 1.
Ibid., 95.
- 2.
Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980), 8.
- 3.
Michel de Certeau , qtd. in Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, National History, and the Historical Reality,” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005), 147.
- 4.
Maria Margaronis, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Historical Workshop Journal 65 (2008), 138.
- 5.
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Routledge, 1962).
- 6.
R. Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2010), and Jerome de Groot, This Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010).
- 7.
Richard Slotkin, “Fiction for the Purposes of History,” Rethinking History 9 (2005), 226–7.
- 8.
See Beverley Southgate, “A New Type of History”: Fictional Proposals for Dealing with the Past (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2015).
- 9.
David Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History 39.3 (2008), 483. Also see his edited collection, World Literature in Theory (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), esp. “Part Two: World Literature in the Age of Globalization,” 69–246.
- 10.
Pankaj Mishra, “Beyond the Global Novel,” Financial Times, Sept. 28, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/6e00ad86-26a2-11e3-9dc0-00144feab7de?mhq5j=e6.
- 11.
Tina Chen and Eric Hayot, “Introducing Verge: What Does It Mean to Study Global Asias?”, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1.1 (2015), vi.
- 12.
Ibid., vii.
- 13.
Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 222.
- 14.
Chen Kuan-Hsing, ed., Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 1998); Chen Kuan-Hsing, and Chua Beng Huat, eds., Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007).
- 15.
Brian Fay, “Unconventional History,” History and Theory 41 (2002), 1.
- 16.
Malcolm Moore, “Singapore’s ‘Anti-Chinese’ Curry War,” Telegraph, Aug. 16, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/singapore/8704107/Singapores-anti-Chinese-curry-war.html, and Wong Chun Han, “The Strike That Rattled Singapore: A WSJ Investigation,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 23, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2013/08/26/the-strike-that-rattled-singapore-a-wsj-investigation/.
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Wong, J.Y.C. (2018). Asia’s Other History. In: Wong, J. (eds) Asia and the Historical Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_1
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