A case of mistaken identities? retelling Malaysia's national story / Suvendrini K. Perera -- The rejected imagination in the poetry of Fang Ang, Fu Chengde and Chen Qianghua / Gabriel Wu -- From fragmented identities to post-identity : Lin Xingqian's poetics of diaspora / Tee Kim Tong -- "Why aren't you a Muslim"? pride and prejudice through Gunawan Mahmood's teen fiction / David C.L. Lim -- Looking through the corridor : Malaysia and the MSC / Susan Leong -- The ideological fantasy of British Malaya : a postcolonial reading of Swettenham, Cliford and Burgess / Daniel P.S. Goh -- Globalisation and Bangsa Malaysia discourse in racial crisis / Mohon Ambikaipaker -- "Your memories are our memories" : remembering culture as race in Malaysia and K.S. Maniam's Between lives / David C.L. Lim -- A passion for other lovers : rewriting the 'other' in Ooi Yang-May's fictionalisation of multiethnic Malaysia / Tamara S. Wagner
"Overcoming Passion" examines the passion for race in contemporary Malaysia. Broadly the essays look at the disjunction between the falsity of race as a scientific category and the entrenched belief that race determines one's rightful identity. They probe the ways in which individual minds and institutions of power fail or refuse to recognize and act in accordance with the knowledge that race exists only insofar as its existence is sustained by the believer's belief in it. The contributors draw from a burgeoning but under-examined archive of Malaysia-related social texts
