SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

2025-06-18T21:05:25+08:00

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Flowers From Afar

2024-11-28T17:41:08+08:00

This essay explores the agency of the nonhuman—particularly flowers, both organic and artificial—in activating possibilities of a community. Considering the predominance of Eurowestern scholarship in the nonhuman turn, this essay takes as its critical point of departure the marginal context of the Philippines and its diaspora through selected material artistic and literary texts. The essay first examines the work Mayflowers (2021) which stages an encounter with Filipino migrants in various parts of the world through paper flowers, virtually allowing them to be in their home country during the COVID-19 pandemic. To further expound on the floral agency at work, the essay then reads the 1886 poem “A las flores de Heidelberg” by the Filipino patriot José Rizal, approaching it beyond its typical appreciation as a nostalgic ode to the Philippines through comparing it with the Thai poetic genre of nirat (นิราศ). In doing so, the flower is recognized to be a matter capable of yoking together distant subjects, allowing the unfolding an epiphytic community. To extend the prospect of the latter beyond mere nationalism, the essay takes a final turn to another community involved with the craft of making flowers in Central Thailand, juxtaposing them with the community of Filipino migrants brought together by Mayflowers, as to constellate their comparable plights toward a solidarity that is especially made visible by these nonhuman matters.

Reimagining Animism

2024-12-03T19:01:05+08:00

This paper explores the complex interplay between human consciousness, nature, and spiritual realms in folklore from the Malay world through the lens of the ecocritical psyche. By reimagining animism beyond colonialist interpretations, the study reveals a worldview where the psyche extends into the environment, and life, death, morality, and community are interconnected across vertical and horizontal axes. The vertical axis governs transitions between realms, with ancestors, death, and spiritual beliefs exemplifying the reciprocal relationship between the living and the spiritual world. In contrast, the horizontal axis highlights the community’s responsibility to maintain harmony, reflected through rituals like the Turun Ka Bondang ceremony and Ritual of Sebayuh. Through analyses of tales such as the crocodile “Buwaya” and “Kangkuksa Pelesit,” the paper also demonstrates how forces of good and evil are intertwined with cultural, ecological, and psychological dimensions. Fundamentally, Malay animism, as reflected in these stories, offers a sophisticated system of ecological and psychological integration, where balance is not fixed but actively cultivated. This study affirms that sustainable relationships with the natural world, spiritual realms, and communal life are essential for psychological wholeness and ecological harmony in the Malay cosmos.

The Economics of Oppression

2025-03-21T05:05:16+08:00

This research paper examines gendered domestic servitude in the Pakistani social milieu through Uzma Aslam Khan’s debut novel The Story of Noble Rot, highlighting the subaltern subject positioning of female domestic workers within a deeply stratified society. It scrutinizes the contrasting lives of a maidservant and an affluent businessman’s wife to explore the rigid master-servant dynamic shaped by economic disparity and patriarchal control. The analysis delineates how patriarchal structures dictate women’s roles, showing that wealth does not always guarantee autonomy, nor does financial contribution ensure ascendancy within the household. The relationships Mrs. Masood and Malika hold, both with the men in their lives and with each other, emphasize the pervasive discrimination that continues to shape women’s lived experiences in contemporary Pakistani society. By focusing on the master-servant relationship and broader societal disparities, the paper underscores the structural inequalities that keep domestic workers in cycles of penury, limiting their social and financial mobility despite temporary shifts in power.

Comedians Performing the Margins

2024-10-05T17:52:49+08:00

This study compares the representations of gender in the comedic performances of Tito, Vic, and Joey (TVJ) from the Philippines and Dono, Kasino, and Indro (Warkop DKI) from Indonesia, using the framework of hegemonic masculinities. These trios embodied gendered identities that reflected and reinforced the strongman politics of the 1970s and 1980s under Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia. While both groups portrayed themselves as rebellious outliers and tricksters in the urban landscapes of Manila and Jakarta, their humor paradoxically served to bolster state power reinforcing traditional masculine dynamics. Through their performances, these comedians navigated a nuanced interplay between insubordination and subservience, which concealed far more insidious forms of tyranny and corruption within their respective socio-political contexts. This paper demonstrates how these comedic representations reveal and reinforce shared cultural practices in Southeast Asia, bridging the perceived divide between the Philippines and Indonesia despite their distinct religious and colonial histories.

Japan in the United States' Reverse Course

2025-03-28T16:27:42+08:00

This article examines how Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986) represents the ambivalence of Ono, its Japanese narrator in postwar Japan, as he confronts his past role in creating propagandistic posters for the Japanese Empire’s militarism during the United States Reverse Course. After World War II, the US occupation of Japan (1945–1952), which marked the US Empire’s dismantling of the Japanese Empire, initially sought to demilitarise Japan. However, to counter communism, around 1947 or 1948, the US introduced the Reverse Course in Japan, which contradictorily relaxed its demilitarisation efforts and permitted remilitarisation. The Reverse Course’s contradictory messages about militarisation, this article argues, serve as the backdrop for Artist’s depiction of Ono’s ambivalence about his past involvement in Japanese militarism. Mobilising Laura Doyle’s inter-imperiality, the textual analysis demonstrates that, under the US Empire’s Reverse Course, Ono is ambivalent about admitting his past advocacy of the Japanese Empire’s militarism was wrong, despite acknowledging the ideology’s severe consequences in postwar Japan. It shows how the US Reverse Course perpetuated remnants of Japanese militarism after the war The findings fill the research gap of current scholarship on Artist, which is rarely grounded in Japan’s postwar history intertwined with the US.

Gagak Hitam

2025-03-20T16:06:43+08:00

This poem is a Malay-English hybrid poem, predominantly in the Malay language, from the point of view of a crow in Malaysia, a so-called Malaysian. A line-by-line English translation has been provided for the Malay words, unless it sounds better to include or exclude certain parts, in which case (artistic) liberty has been taken and the lines do not match, though this is rare. Certain words have not been translated where the translation has been given in the original poem itself. This poem attempts to characterise the crow’s misgivings about humans in general, while at the same time lending itself some human qualities. Perhaps this crow may even be misanthropic in nature, though in manner and in scale, no more destructive (if not less) than humans. It can be argued that the crow, in highlighting its desire to add layers of meaning to its name, is also revealing its secret wish and intentions, in the way that humans too have desires.

A Book Review on Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran's (editors) _The Colors of April: Fiction on the Vietnam War's Legacy 50 Years Later_

2025-05-30T00:56:04+08:00

Abstract

The Colors of April, edited by Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran, is a pioneering anthology that includes a range of short stories that amplifies the voices of Vietnamese and Vietnamese American authors. In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the conclusion of the Vietnam War (1975-2025), the book aims to challenge false conceptions of this war through the collection of multiple perspectives and stories that address how the war impacted different people, regardless of their political and militaristic affiliations. The major themes of this text include displacement, trauma, and transnational remembrance. This book also provides a broader understanding of war and seeks to highlight the political and ethical act of translational and multi-cultural literature—an act that demonstrates the humanity that is often forgotten in the turmoils of war.

Book Review His Majesty’s Headhunters: The Siege of Kohima that shaped World History by Mmhonlumo Kikon

2025-02-15T23:38:11+08:00

Mmhonlumo Kikon’s His Majesty’s Headhunters: The Siege of Kohima that Shaped World History (2023) is a significant addition to the historiography of Northeast India, particularly in the context of colonialism and World War II. The book challenges dominant historical narratives by centering the agency of the Naga people in both resisting British imperialism and playing a decisive role in the Battle of Kohima. Through a combination of archival research and oral histories, Kikon reclaims the Indigenous perspective, offering a counter-narrative to colonial accounts that have long marginalized Naga voices. This review critically engages with Kikon’s methodological interventions, his argument on the erasure of Naga contributions, and the book’s broader implications for postcolonial and decolonial historiography.

EDITORIAL Connections and Divisions Across Borders

2025-06-18T19:34:12+08:00

EDITORIAL: Connections and Divisions Across Borders