This paper examines the extent to which contemporary globalisation diminishes local culture to pose itself as a formidable threat to Southeast Asian cultural values. Southeast Asia is home to thousands of different ethnic peoples with their distinctive languages, cultures, mores and religious beliefs. These unique traits comprise their cultural heritage, which is passed down from generation to generation. However, the contemporary process of globalisation results in an intrusion into indigenous Southeast Asian cultures. In spite of the genuine fear of globalisation’s erosion of traditional lifestyles, cultural mores and religious beliefs, we argue that attempts to resist its negative implications have been inadequate with respect to Southeast Asian nations and peoples.

Muslim Burmat’s novel Permainan Laut (“Play at Sea”) (2008) explores the social undercurrents of a fishing village located in the Brunei Bay in the period just after independence. Cultural nuances are examined via representations of the female subject prescribed within the Malay language and a national culture which produces the harmonious, yet regulated, lives of gendered citizens in the sovereign Islamic nation. As a tightly-knit nation, Brunei Darussalam ascribes to the model of melayu jati (“malay identity”), which inscribes family values strengthened by the national philosophy. In this way, women’s cultural subservience and auxiliary role underscore their conformity with the “MIB” (Malay Islamic Monarchy) ethos undergirding the national polity. With Islamic patriarchal rules, women also understand that their distinctive roles are defined by social taboos regulated within the gender binary. Furthermore, the monarch’s celebrated rhetoric of himself as the “caring father” informs the family unit, where women serve under their male leaders. This paper discusses negotiations with local language, beliefs, and customs at the arrival of, and enacted by, a tourist-cum-resident woman. In her interaction with local women and eventual marriage to a local man, she assimilates into dominant Malay culture, but also discovers a lacuna that signals an aporia in the outsider-cum-insider’s impasse of Malay identity. Keywords

This paper examines an Anglophone Bruneian novel, The Last Bastion of Ingei (2016), by Aammton Alias, as postcolonial speculative fiction. Employing the double lines of enquiry provided by the Orientalist colonial gaze and ideology of progress, I discuss symbolic and materialist aspects of the violent processes of othering experienced within the Bruneian nation. The novel delineates the way that a colonial mindset undermines indigenous and minority identities. I contend that the hybridity of human-hantu relations functions as a strategy of resistance by collapsing demarcated boundaries between self and alien other. A further revival of the cultures of indigenous Malays, non-indigenous Ibans, and Penans within Brunei exhibits the extent to which the novel’s project of decolonization is promoted. Furthermore, a dystopian world of conflict is rejected in an ultimate desire for utopian peace and happiness as the novel calls for a suturing of social and racial divisions. To this end, a unified nation is yearned for via speculative scenes of reconciled relations of its family members. Hence, I argue that this novel offers a valuable critique of the conditions of postcolonial identity through contested powers, spaces and voices through its speculative narrative plot.