Rethinking Subjectivity in Anglophone Chinese Bruneian Poetry

Ethnic Chinese communities in the Malay world, including those who hail from the Southeast Asian nation of Brunei Darussalam, navigate sociocultural demarcations determined by nation-states but also geopolitical trends that tend to blur national boundaries to encourage transnational configurations of identity. Lying on the social margins of Malay-dominant nations, ethnic Chinese negotiate peripheral spaces while undergoing considerable processes of globalization that challenge dominant discourses of their inscrutability. Ongoing processes of migration encourage global movements, meanings, and makings of a transnational belonging and existence. Significantly, this chapter examines national and transnational ideologies that inform instantiations of Chinese subjectivities. The chapter analyses emergent Anglophone Bruneian poetry to highlight agency as a response to cultural dilemmas encountered in crossing borders and transcending boundaries. The transnational Anglophone poetry of Chinese Bruneians, such as Andy Sia’s poems ‘The Flower’ and ‘The Ghostwriter’, is explored to interrogate their intra- and inter-Asia engagements to navigate sociocultural and geopolitical margins across spaces for constructing subjectivity. Ultimately, this study carries implications for future trajectories of transnational studies whilst envisaging literary possibilities to move away from the term of diaspora when analysing transnational connections that inform and shape Chinese subjectivity.