Dr. Fiona Lee is a literary and cultural studies scholar. Her research explores histories of decolonization and the global Cold War through the study of literature and the arts, with a focus on Malaysia and the Asia Pacific. Research interests include postcolonial and critical theory, world/global anglophone literature, 20th and 21st centuries literary histories of the Asia Pacific, language politics, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and cultural studies. She has published essays on Malaysian literature, art, cinema, and culture. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur (Dec 2021 -). Before joining UM, she held academic appointments at the National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute (2014–2016) and the University of Sydney, Australia (2016–2021).
Latest Update: Dr Fiona Lee just completed her time at the Harvard-Yenching Institute for the 2024/2025 academic year. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur.
Language Stories
December, 2024
As a supplement to teaching diasporic, postcolonial Anglophone literature, I developed this set of questions to invite students to critically reflect on the presence of English in their language stories. I use the term “lan-guage stories” to mean two things:(1) how language shapes our life stories by drawing attention to its function as a material force for shaping identity, community, and social relations, and (2) the stories we tell ourselves such as historical or ideological narratives to explain the significance of English in our lives.
Malaysian Literature in English, Global Anglophone Literature?
December, 2024
The globalized nature of academic knowledge production today has resulted in what might be called the race for English. Scholarship written in English, particularly in the Global North, has a more dominant influence compared to knowledge produced in other languages, even in research fields that require fluency in multiple tongues. For example, Tharaphi Than (2021) notes that” for academics in Myanmar [doing research on Myanmar],’arriving and making it in the academy’means learning the language of the West: acquiring linguistic skills and finding how their own research’objects’ are written in the Western canon.” Similarly, Fan-sen Wang observes that the institutional drive for” global competitiveness” in Taiwan’s academic human-ities has incentivized scholars to write less in Chinese for local audiences in favor of publishing in internationally indexed English academic journals that” pander to the interests of the Anglo-American academy”(2017, 179). In the discipline of English literature, English is not only a medium of scholarly communication; the language’s aesthetic and cultural uses are also its object of analysis. This essay argues that the discipline’s built-in self-reflexivity about how language makes meaning can benefit from a Global Asias praxis of examining the relationship between area, race/ethnicity, and diasporic studies.
The Life Force of Language
July, 2024
An essay on the politics of language in Malaysia, written for the catalogue of Tan Zi Hao’s solo exhibition, The Tongue Has No Bones.
Book Review
Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature
November, 2023
Amidst a heightened consciousness about diversity and inclusion, spotlighting a writer’s marginalised status–whether in terms of ethnicity, language, or location–has become a way of gaining visibility within powerful institutions of world literature. Cheow Thia Chan’s book sheds light on this paradox in its study of Malaysian Chinese or Mahua literature. In the Eurocentric sphere of world literature, Chinese writing occupies a minoritised position. Within modern Chinese literature, Mahua literature is often eclipsed by mainland China’s dominance. In the context of Malaysian literature, the state’s sole recognition of Malay as the national language effectively casts work in non-Malay languages, including Chinese, as ‘sectional literatures’, that is, work that is deemed to represent only a part of the ethno-linguistically diverse nation rather than its totality.
Invincible Communists, Invisible Labor, Interwoven Lives
September, 2023
Essay on The Asian American Writers’ Workshop as part of “The Rainforest Speaks: Reimagining the Malayan Emergency” essays and stories from a new generation of writers grappling with the Malayan Emergency.
Three artistic works, recently showcased in Kuala Lumpur and beyond, suggest why it matters that we think about the history of the Malayan Emergency in concert with the contemporary COVID-19 and climate emergencies.
By the Book: Malaysian Fiction and What It Says About Us
September, 2022
Podcast on BFM 89.9, The Business Station
In anticipation of Malaysia Day, we discuss how English fiction in Malaysia has evolved, and what our literature says about the country, culture, and our aspirations. We close off the conversation with recommendations of local fiction to check out.
Produced by: Lee Chwi Lynn, Sharmilla Ganesan
Feminist Collaborations: In Conversation with Lan Duong
January, 2022
In August 2021, Amy Tong and I had the privilege of speaking with Lan Duong about her poetry, scholarship on diasporic Vietnamese literature, art, and cinema, and community arts activism. The interview, “Feminist Collaborations: In Conversation with Lan Duong” is now published in Southeast Asia Review in English and is part of a special issue on Transpacific American Literature.
We embarked on a wide-ranging conversation about the relationship between creative practice and critical scholarship, theorising and practising feminist collaboration, right-wing politics in Asian immigrant/diasporic communities, and the importance of situating refugee narratives within broader histories of imperialism and settler colonialism. In sharing her work with us, Lan offers a glimpse of the exciting, much needed work happening in the field of critical refugee studies.
Barbarian Invasion: Malaysian New Wave’s return to self
December, 2021
My review of Barbarian Invasion 野蛮人入侵 (2021, dir. Tan Chui Mui), a riveting meditation on motherhood, transnational Southeast Asian cinema and the demanding sacrifices involved in filmmaking.
Malaysia Design Archive: A Digital Undercommons
July, 2021
In 2019, I embarked on a project with Malaysia Design Archive (MDA) to explore how its archival practices and engagement with the arts and activ- ist communities presented opportunities for theorizing the notion of archives anew. Emerging out of this ongoing collaboration, this essay considers the significance of digital information communication technologies in shaping MDA’s mission, history, and growth.
Invisible Threads
June, 2021
Essay on artworks by Sharon Chin for the Protest and Recuperation exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University.
Neutralizing English: Han Suyin and the language politics of Third World literature
April, 2021
Abstract:
The writings of Han Suyin during her sojourn in British Malaya from the 1950s to 1960s are a rich archive for understanding how the Cold War’s impact on postcolonial nation-building contributed to the remaking of English as a supposedly neutral language. Han styled herself as a spokesperson for China to the English-speaking world during the early decades of communist rule. Her writings arguably helped to fashion English as a transparent medium for representing Asia, a conception of language that informs global literary publishing today. Yet her work, which was influenced by her participation in the Afro-Asian Writers Conferences organized in the wake of the 1955 Bandung Conference, as well as her experience of living in Malaya during the colonial counter-insurgency against communists, also offers insights on how English’s neutrality ought to be understood in relation to forestalled Third World movements and racialized antagonisms in postcolonial nations.
The Subject and the Partner in Malaysia: A Discussion with Fiona Lee
April, 2021
Dr Thushara Dibley speaks with Dr Fiona Lee about a unique research project she’s been managing on cultural archives in Malaysia, where her research partner is also the subject of her research.
“Han Chinese racism and Malaysian contexts: cosmopolitan racial formations in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 20.2 June 2019: 220-237. [pdf]
“Epistemological Checkpoint: The Novelization of the Malayan Emergency in Han Suyin’s …And the Rain My Drink.”Postcolonial Text 9.1 (2014). 1–14. [pdf]
“Spectral History: Unsettling Nation Time in The Last Communist.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39.1 (March 2013). 77–95. [pdf]
“Review: Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 3 (2012): n. pag. [link].
“Review: Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14.2 (2012): 319–321. [pdf]
“National Ghosts and Global Literature.” Reviews in Cultural Theory 1.2 (2010): n. pag. [link]
“Reading the Transnational in the Local. Or, How the Local Travels: The Case of Survival Guide Untuk Kampung Radioaktif.” In Media Res: A Media Commons Project. January 25, 2012.
“The Frontline of Privatizing Public Higher Education.” Possible Futures: A Project of the Social Science Research Council. November 28, 2011.