Hegemony, national allegory, exile: The poetry of Shirley Lim.

Abstract

Explores the poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim alongside her critical writings. Lim's successful career as an Asian American poet, novelist and academic after having left Malaysia, where non-Malay Anglophone writers suffer multiple exclusions from a Malay nationalism that discriminates on the basis of race and language, and from British and American academies that traditionally confer second-class status on to non-British or American writers; Third source of exclusion that stems from patriarchal oppression; Reading of Lim's poetry as national allegories and fictional autobiography; Exploration of how Lim's Asian American feminist poetics interrogate the ideological enclosures.