Contested Imagi(nations): Malaysian and Singapore Literature

Focusing on Malaysia and Singapore, this dissertation explores how the two nations are conceived and represented in both fiction and poetry, as these literary texts position themselves within or against the centrality of their respective ideologically constructed national narratives. This historically grounded study posits the separation of Malaysia and Singapore in 1965 as the critical juncture that shaped their divergent political trajectories, as various writers from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds grapple with the fraught and contested question of what constitutes the nation.