Navigating Liminality: A Peranakan Autoethnography of Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Global Education

This article uses an autoethnographic approach to examine how Peranakan identity in Malaysia, forged through centuries of creolisation and colonial modernity, provides a framework for rethinking citizenship in the global age. Drawing on reflections on growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, while retaining ties to a Malacca Chinese Peranakan lineage and gaining subsequent experience across transnational educational circuits, the paper explores how the community's ingrained hybridity, linguistic fluidity, and cultural adaptability constitute a powerful, vernacular disposition toward global engagement. The analysis intervenes in debates on globalization and pedagogy by situating this experience as a form of cosmopolitan nationalism: a synthesis of local attachment and transnational openness that resists the binaries of rootedness and mobility. It argues that this cosmopolitan disposition is not merely a historical or cultural relic, but an essential civic orientation for navigating the neoliberal age. Such a disposition offers global education a crucial critical civic orientation, advocating for a lived ethic that cultivates empathy, relationality, and critical awareness of global power asymmetries. By foregrounding a Southeast Asian epistemology of coexistence, this study also challenges Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism and contributes to scholarship on postcolonial identity, belonging, and the future of global education from the Asian periphery.