Asia and the Historical Imagination is concerned with the significance of region and locality , and its method is most immediately preoccupied with the exploration of local networks of political and cultural exchanges that have been, and still are, at the heart of an Asian polity. This interdisciplinary project conceptualizes the ways in which literary scholars and historians think about fictional histories, and how the study of historical fiction can generate critical dialogues that attempt to bridge the great divide between the two disciplines and draw attention to some of the challenges scholars face in the interpretation of imagined narratives within historical frameworks. The region’s history, the colonization and decolonization of many of its countries, and their rapid development in the race to participate in the globalized economy are duly documented in textbooks and mainstream media. The social and cultural impact that accompanies the larger political reconfiguration on the global stage has been carefully examined but the less tangible impact of these changes is recorded in imagined voices. In considering the role of imagined voices against the backdrop of historical narratives, an Asian-centric approach to historical fiction aims to produce more meaningful and nuanced discussions of what it means to be literary and historical when dealing with a genre that essentially has a different set of criteria and boundaries.

At one level, there are geographical boundaries; at another, there are cultural boundaries, and these are often in flux and fluid as they are determined, defined, and reinvented by socio-political and economic imperatives. Political and ideological boundaries, which are especially pertinent to this volume given the number of essays that focus on Southeast Asian countries, are more strategic. The term “Southeast Asia” came into use from Britain’s commanding post, the Mountbatten Command, in Colombo. Eventually, the Americans, French, and Dutch used it too, and the term was used to locate the vulnerable region that was in close proximity to the two main powers of the East: China and India : “The Americans took some time to accept it because they thought in terms of East Asia , or the Western Pacific. They never looked at South Asia much, the way the British and the French did. On their side, Europeans saw India and they saw China ; and they saw the region in between as a residue. So the French used the term ‘Indochine’,” which reflected their understanding of the region as being “a bit of China and a bit of India .”¹ Southeast Asia , in the eyes of Western strategic planners, was situated in terms of India and China . But from the 1980s onwards, the orientation of the region changed. The decolonization of Asia was complete when Hong Kong and Macau became special administrative regions of China in the 1990s, and Timor-Leste gained independence in 2002. The responses to the decolonization in these places are certainly not the same as those in India , Burma , Malaya, or Singapore in the 1940s and 1960s. International coverage and diplomatic dialogues, too, mapped out new local, global , and, for the purpose of our study of literature and history, rhetorical boundaries. Questions of national security and national welfare have also transformed the ways nations perceive and express political and cultural identities, and arguably, nowhere are these complex issues more powerfully and sensitively articulated than in historical fiction.

Without delving into the theoretical debates about narration and narrativity that are beyond the scope of this collection, it should be noted that Asia and the Historical Imagination is nonetheless indebted to their influence on literary representations of historical events. Literary narratives are, after all, fictional narratives; the implication of narrating and narrativization and its significance in the development of modern historiography have been persuasively discussed in Hayden White’s seminal essay, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980), among his other works. Given his interest in the role of imagination in historical discourse, it is no wonder that the historian has received as much attention in literary circles, if not more so, than among historians. Even though the two disciplines adopt vastly different research methods, they are both interested in storytelling:

Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give to real events the form of a story […]. What is involved, then, in that finding of the “true story,” that discovery of the “real story” within or behind the events that come to us in the chaotic form of “historical records”? What wish is enacted, what desire is gratified, by the fantasy that real events are properly represented when they can be shown to display the formal coherency of a story? In the enigma of this wish, this desire, we catch a glimpse of the cultural function of narrativizing discourse in general, an intimation of the psychological impulse behind the apparently universal need not only to narrate but to give to events an aspect of narrativity.²

Historical fiction’s place is distinct and unique, not simply because it shares the impulses of the two disciplines but because it subverts their assumptions as well; as Michel de Certeau puts it, “Fiction is the repressed other of historical discourse.”³ In “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Maria Margonis describes the historical novel as a “no-man’s land on the borders of fact and fantasy .” The questions she raises are questions that are on the minds of every historian and literary critic, and, of course, the historical fiction novelist: “What responsibility does a novelist have to the historical record? How much—and what kinds of things—is permissible to invent? For the purposes of fiction, what counts as evidence?”⁴ These types of questions seem to imply that fiction must play with history’s “rules” (whatever those rules are) to properly represent.

Many of the literary works covered in this volume are less interested in addressing, assessing, or critiquing the history as “properly represented” than they are in examining how the stories resist articulation; it is the tensions in this resistance, manifest in the authors’ attempts to represent proscriptions of political loyalties and cultural identities, the oppression of marginalized groups, and the suppression of persecuted voices, that essentially produce other stories—these are stories that cannot be properly represented in history’s story. Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1932/1962) asserts that the emergence of historical fiction after the French Revolution was especially significant. Using a Marxist framework, he sees the genre as a form in which the masses can find meaning in class struggle and in the people’s attempt to map out the historical and social implications in the wake of rising fascist sentiments in Europe.⁵ More recently, scholars like R. Johnsen and Jerome de Groot have regarded historical fiction as an important supplement to more conventional histories, which generally neglect underrepresented groups and marginalized voices.⁶ For Richard Slotkin, historical fiction opens up avenues for historical inquiry that are traditionally closed to conventional histories:

[Historical fiction] can do more than re-create historical events, ideas, manners, environments. It can create a simulacrum or model of the historical world, miniaturized and compressed in scale and time; a model which embodies a theory of historical causation. The hypothesis can be tested by a kind of thought-experiment: assume that events are driven by the conditions and forces you believe to be most significant—what sort of history, what kind of human experience, then results? For the thought experiment to work, the fiction writer must treat a theory which may be true as if it was certainly true, without quibble or qualification; and credibly represent a material world in which that theory appears to work.⁷

This aspect of historical fiction has also led historians to give new meaning to the understanding of history, and what was once dismissed as not-history is now recognized as an important element of historical inquiry; what historical fiction “lacks” in objectivity, it gives back many times over with its approach to the ethical-oriented subject.⁸

Arguably, history, together with the historical fiction writer, is the co-creator of the fictional characters in the novels covered in this volume; and in many cases, these characters struggle with their co-creator to control and produce alternative histories. The objective of Asia and the Historical Imagination is to analyze and demonstrate how this is achieved through literary representation and how so-called truth-telling can only be narrativized and made meaningful with narrative devices that contest assumptions of historical truth. Historical fiction creates a new imperative for historical understanding that is quite apart from the writing and reading of historical narratives; it breaks away from the descriptive protocol that demands the turning of events into coherent stories that promote cognitive meaning, and as it will become apparent in the following chapters, historical fiction often creates meaning by bringing the chaos of events to the foreground and into the lives of its fictional characters—the burden of meaning-making lies entirely with the reader and his/her assumptions of conventional histories. Within the context of regional histories, these assumptions also question how the interplay between history and fiction can produce meaningful and critical narratives against the backdrop of a globalized world.

Regional concern rarely plays a central role in the study of historical fiction; to situate regional significance in the literary representation of history, we should begin by approaching the limitations of examining historical fiction within a global context first. Historical fiction’s links to world literature should not be underestimated here; they share a priority to represent histories, peoples, and cultures—to tell the truth in its various forms and permutations, and to...