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Kritika Kultura

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0511-6235 https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7021-7332

Abstract

This article reframes Sinophone Malaysian (Mahua) literature through the perspective of island studies, foregrounding Malaysia’s cross-island configuration. We propose negative islandness as an operational category: a structurally produced negative affect of suspension, deferral, and dread generated by the island–sea regime’s simultaneous openness and boundedness. We argue that, in Ng Kim Chew’s “Fish Bones” and “Allah’s Will,” the island operates as a mechanism that interstitializes perspectives and tidalizes narrative time, thereby converting arrival into an unfinished passage and relocating trauma into embodied, material rhythms. Through close readings, we develop two interrelated strands: First, an interstitial perspective with the temporality of tides shows characters held between external and internal viewpoints, and between sea and land connectivity, where the rhythm of departure and return continually defers arrival into an unfinished passage. Second, the emotional source underlying the negative aesthetic style—marked by stickiness, gloom, and damp heaviness—is a shared affect born from historical trauma, loss, repression, and dispossession. This affective formation is described as unfinished mourning, manifested through the intertwined sensations of rootlessness, anxiety, and suppression. In shifting the island from backdrop to comprehensive mechanism, this study moves beyond Chineseness/locality binaries and clarifies how island perspectives organize narrative form, affective structure, and identity negotiation in Mahua texts. This article therefore clarifies how archipelagic forms organize narrative, emotion, and identity across Asian littorals, opening comparative routes for research on diaspora, memory, and belonging.

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