Representing and Resisting Global Governmentality in Southeast Asian Literature

Scholarly attention to English-language writing from Southeast Asia has often been limited to monographs and essay anthologies focusing on literature from one or two countries or surveys of regional literary histories. Christopher Patterson’s Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific is a timely and provocative intervention that situates Anglophone narratives by writers from Southeast Asian countries and their diasporas (mainly but not limited to Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines) within a transnational and transpacific framework of analysis. What distinguishes Patterson’s work from earlier books on Southeast Asian literature by Eddie Tay, Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden, Caroline Hau, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim is his formulation of the concept “global imaginary” as opposed to a national, diasporic, or transnational discourse (114).¹ Through a series of historically grounded and meticulous close readings, Patterson illustrates how various authors and texts from Southeast Asia and North America represent, interrogate, and resist the global imaginary, defined as “an affective and collectivizing force” whose “affects create new desires for access to globality”; although this imaginary is “reliant upon North American modes of multiculturalism for ethical recognition,” it is also “symbolically active within global cities [in Southeast Asia] like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila.” Unusually, this central concept is only introduced and elaborated in the book’s second section, containing chapters on novels about migration and movement from Southeast Asia to North America. This makes sense, as our contemporary understanding of the global is inextricable from economic and demographic mobility. However, it might have been possible to discuss how the global imaginary also factors into the apparently more nation-centered literary narratives from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines (which are covered in the first section), especially since Patterson makes the case that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American colonialism in the region created biopolitical regimes of racial and cultural management. The similarity between racialized modes of governance in the United States and in Southeast Asian countries stems from the historical borrowing of British colonial thinking and regulatory policies by Americans in the region during the early decades of the twentieth century as the United States expanded its empire in the Pacific. Such biopolitical regulation serves as the basis for the particular mode of imagining the global described by Patterson. Instead of employing existing terms such as multiculturalism and diversity, which aside from having more celebratory overtones are also somewhat shopworn, Patterson uses “pluralist governmentality” to describe the incorporation and instrumentalization of difference within biopolitical governance, and to show “ideological overlap between the colonial states and the imperial centers” (14). This is an inspired move that both acknowledges the (post)colonial and imperial histories of the countries and communities represented in the primary texts and their common predicament of needing to create a feasible group identity either through ascribed ethno-racial characteristics or performative gestures of cultural authenticity, which are often managed through state or governmental fiat.

The counterpoint to such imposition of state-sponsored identification is what Patterson calls “transitive culture,” which refers both to a practice and a condition of transition or being in between racial and ethnic identities ascribed by colonial and imperial regimes. Transition does not do away with identity but imagines “an alternative politics of identity” (3), one that enables “a sustainable cultural form that maneuvers through, rather than directly against, given identities and categorizations” and “takes advantage of recognizable aesthetic forms or genres” to perform its critique of pluralist governmentality (4). To develop this cultural form, Patterson brings together an unusual set of international interlocutors: Malaysian writers and intellectuals K. S. Maniam and Lloyd Fernando, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and American gender theorist Judith Butler. One would not usually mention these scholars in the same breath, yet Patterson traces how they have in various ways employed the terms “transitive” and “transition” in their thinking, which he then synthesizes into his own formulation. Unlike existing postcolonial concepts of...