This presentation examines an emerging group of speculative fiction texts called "hopepunk" that have been voluntarily discussed, selected and advocated by a group of speculative fiction writers, readers, media, and publishers since 2017. In response to increasing discrimination and injustice around gender, race, class, and religion, exacerbated during the Trump administration, hopepunk proponents are exploring an imagination of care to counter the prevailing cynicism and nihilism. In this presentation, I suggest that while the specific imaginaries of care proposed by hopepunk texts are grounded in progressive principles of inclusion, equality, and anti-discrimination, the construction of such care in hopepunk exposes the conflicts between a progressive imaginary of community-based care and the currently dominant neoliberal model of self-responsible care. Reading a representative hopepunk text, the Wayfarer series (2014-2021) by Becky Chambers, I discuss how attempts at a progressive imaginary of care can be limited by its focus on the moral education of care, which obscures the complications caused by vulnerability and dependence on the social infrastructure that distributes resources and labor, and redirects the duty of care back to the individual as the primary agent and the family as the primary site for all responsibilities of care.

This presentation proposes reorienting the locus of Malaysian Literature in English (MLE), an emerging body of scholarship grounded in the national, through reconsidering its mainstream methodological approach of authoritative canonicity, suggesting a path beyond the “border barricades” of colonialism. Though a postcolonial field concerned with the formation of English-language writing in post-Independence Malaysia through nationalist, anticolonialist strategies, examinations of MLE have fallen into the trap of reproducing authoritative canonicity. Read through one of the symbols I associate with the nation-space of Malaysia –that of foodways -- this presentation constructs what John Guillory would call an “alternative canon” as a strategy of resistance through its examination of the function of foodways in Malaysian Literature in English. Particularly, I place a short story typically associated with Sinophone Malaysian literature, Ng Kim Chew’s “Allah’s Will”, in conversation with the writing of Nina Mingya Powles, a New Zealand-born writer with ties to Malaysia, as a means of speaking to the heteroglossic nature of Malaysian English, simultaneously broadening what constitutes MLE. I assert the place of “Malaysia” as a literary space through the “geo-body,” or what Thongchai Winichakul describe as a reified geographical space bearing “a component of the life of a nation [...] a source of pride, loyalty, love, passion, bias hatred, reason, unreason.” Charting the components that form the “life of a nation”, I suggest there is a Malaysian literary geo-body that troubles taxonomies based on citizenship and language in relation to the study of national literary traditions, and it is through foodways as one of its constitutive symbols where such a geo-body takes shape.

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.