Pillai
Biographic Data
| ID | 14541 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pillai |
| FAMILY NAME | Pillai |
| SIGNATURE | PILLAI |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Malaysia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7555-5698 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Trans-temporal Discursivities
This study investigates the media representations of Malaya in French colonial newspapers between 1936 and 1941, with emphasis on the role of editorial gatekeeping and the mediating effects of contemporary AI-assisted translation. It demonstrates how AI translation technologies reshape access to and interpretation of French colonial newspaper narratives, influencing how non-European cultures were understood. It also reveals how gatekeeping mechan…
The Flavours of Migration
The concept of resilience in diasporic contexts emphasises how individuals and groups deploy cultural traditions and adaptive tactics to confront hurdles and retain their identities in the backdrop of relocation. Masten underscores the power of endurance in adjusting to notable challenges. In a transnational environment, food functions as an important emblem of resilience, where it connects diasporic individuals to their cultural roots and promis…
The Construction of Archetypal Hero Identity in Selected Asian American Literary Works
This study examines the construction of hero archetypes in three significant Asian American literary works: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Through the theoretical framework of Yinyang philosophy and Jungian archetypal theory, the analysis explores how these texts develop complex hero figures that navigate between Asian and American cultural spaces. The study inves…
Reimagining Heroes in Selected Asian American Literature Through the Lens of Wuxing
This study applies Chinese Wuxing theory to analyze heroes in Asian American literature, focusing on works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. It examines how the five elements—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water—are manifested in character traits and interactions. The research investigates how protagonists embody and balance these elements when facing challenges and conflicts. The study explores how these qualities con…
Changing Covenants
The convents of Malaysia, founded by the Sisters of the Infant Jesus—emboldened women who journeyed across the seas from 19th-century France—hold profound cultural and historical importance. Rooted in their mission of faith, charity and outreach, the convent schools transformed into dynamic centres of learning that bridged linguistic and cultural divides. While initially dedicated to promoting educational egalitarianism among the less fortunate, …
Developing Cultural Quotient in the Malaysian English Language Classroom
The incorporation of Malaysian Literatures in English into the Literature in English Component of the English Language curriculum has significantly diminished, resulting in its complete absence from Malaysian classrooms. An early examination of prior texts utilised in Malaysian classrooms indicated that the selection of materials inadequately represented Malaysia's multicultural society and the various ethnicities inside the nation. This advanced…
The Cultural Unconscious of Peter Hessler as a Peace Corps Volunteer Teacher in River Town
This article investigates the influence of the Peace Corps' salient ideology in Peter Hessler's works focusing on modern China. As a volunteer of the third cohort of the Peace Corps in China, Hessler served in Sichuan province from 1996 to 1998. We argue that the ideological overtones of the Peace Corps programme significantly influence his representation of China and use his memoir River Town as an example. Applying the concepts of the cultural …
Rerouting The Worlding of Inter-Ethnic Estrangement Through Critical Solace
Intergenerational Ambivalence and Negotiations
The millennium is witnessing the emergence of several key feature films produced by Malaysian producers-directors of Chinese ethnicity. Such Malaysian Chinese films comprise a majority of ethnic Chinese as lead actors, who converse predominantly in the Chinese language and consist of narratives that focus on the experiences of the Chinese community in Malaysia. This article seeks to analyse one such film, “The Journey”, directed by Chiu Keng Guan…
Multi-dimensional perspectives of South Indian coolie life in selected memoirs by the European plantocracy of colonial Malaya
This paper traces the multi-dimensional aspects to South Indian coolie life in nineteenth and early twentieth century Malaya to interject into decades of scholarship that has trained on a homogenous focus on plantation fieldwork. In search of the nuances of diasporic diversity, I located three memoirs written by European planters of the Malayan plantocracy, set in rubber plantations and selected primarily for their reflections of South Indian coo…
Diary of a French Missionary
Reviewed by: Diary of a French Missionary: Penang During the Japanese Occupation by Marcel Rouhan Shanthini Pillai Diary of a French Missionary: Penang During the Japanese Occupation. By Marcel Rouhan, Translated and Introduced by Serge Jardin. Penang: Areca Books, 2021, 224 pp. ISBN 9789675719431 The College General in Penang has stood on Malaysian soil from the onset of the 19th Century, with even earlier links to Thailand reaching far back int…
Navigating Sri Lankan Identity in A State of Crisis
Sri Lanka is often thought of as a nation that has been in a constant state of crisis since the start of its civil war in 1983. However, with the passing of time and various government efforts, there have been attempts to heal the tears in the social fabric. Some of these attempts can be seen in the creation of the National Policy on Reconciliation and Co-Existence, of 2017 as well as the establishment of the Office of National Unity and Reconcil…
Semiotic Technology as Material Resonance of Postcolonial Aesthetics in Digital Children’s Picture Book Apps
Children’s literatures presently are produced widely through media production either as remediation of printed stories or originally produced in digital form. The current most sought after digitized communicative practice of the media is the digital children’s picture book app due to its multimediality and interactivity. This quality of the picture book app paves the path for an aesthetic and cultural transformative exchange. However, these digit…
The Synekism of Catholic Faith and Citizenship in Peninsular Malaysia
In this paper, I focus on the influence of the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris ( MEP ) on the performative poetics of Christian faith and citizenship among Malaysian Catholics. Using the central trope of the house, both in its general context of home and dwelling, and its Christian context of the church as a house of worship, I specifically show how cross-border movements, through intersections of individual, material, and cultural mobil…
Unequal discursivities and the symbolic capital of Malaysian Indian scholarship
This paper engages with the aspects of discursive hegemony in terms of both Metropolitan and disciplinary position and privilege, using the sociology of the language that has been produced on Malaysian Indian identity as my point of reference. It contends that these observations and articulations are able to rise to the surface more easily when they are securely located within disciplinary domains often related to determinacy. I argue that viewed…
French and Diasporic Tamil Catholic Mobilities in Colonial Malaya
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
The Apostolic Vicariate of Western Siam and the Rise of Catholicism in Malaysia and Singapore
This article examines the emergence of the Catholic Church in Malaysia and Singapore in the modern period through an exploration of the Apostolic Vicariate of Western Siam (1841–1888). The establishment of this Catholic institution—a temporary territorial jurisdiction in missionary regions that precedes the creation of new dioceses—was key to advancing the transition of the Church from its older colonial model towards a modern national Church. Fo…
The Golden Era of the Malaysian Film Industry
The period of the 1950s to the late 1960s has often been touted as the Golden Era of the Malaysian film industry. This paper examines the extent to which films of the Golden Era, specifically P. Ramlee's Sesudah Suboh (1967) and Gerimis (1968), i.e. two significant films of the era which portray stories about inter-ethnic romantic relationships, visualise the possibilities of inter-ethnic engagement through the films' narrative and the implied is…
Space-Time Formations in the South Indian Tamil Popular Film Kannathil Muthamittal
In tandem with the current development of flm scholarships in the area of the world \nand national cinemas, the paper seeks to examine four scenes from the South Indian \nTamil popular flm “Kannathil Muthamittal” (English: A Peck on the Cheek) using \na concept derived from Hamid Nafcy’s theorisation of an accented cinema known \nas the flmmakers’ “preoccupation with the place.” The conception is cinematically \nexpressed through spatial represen…
Modern Asian ecclesiastical interconnections
This paper explores the dynamics of the modern Asian Catholic ecclesiastical experience in Malaysia within the context of diaspora. Using the South Indian Tamil Catholic community in Malaysia as a case in point, I explore the mediations that occur in ecclesiastical spaces as a result of the points of contact between Catholic Tamil Nadu and its diaspora in Malaysia. Through an analysis of two festivals of ethnic Tamil heritage, the Feast of Our La…
Comparative Constructions of Malaysian Indian Class Dynamics
This article presents a glimpse into the literary writings emanating from a community that has, at best, remained at the margins of global South Asian diasporic literary scholarship: that of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia. It begins with a brief historical overview of the Malaysian Indian community together with an overview and cartography of Malaysian Indian writings. It then develops a comparative analysis of the representation of an issue qui…
The Marginalisation of Malaysian Texts in the English Language Curriculum and Its Impact on Social Cohesion in Malaysian Classrooms
In this paper, we seek to investigate the place that local literature has been given in Malaysian Education in the English Language Subject for Secondary Schools in Malaysia. We argue that literature engenders a space for the nation to share in the experiences and feelings of groups and situations that might never be encountered directly. It often engages with the realities of a nation through diverse constructions of its history, its realities a…
Re-engaging Sri Lanka as a site for reconciliation or a perpetuation of trauma
Memory and home are often at the core of transnational diasporic writings. Transnational Sri Lankan writers are no exception as one often finds that the homeland of Sri Lanka is often the site for memories that jostle between spaces that are both pleasant and traumatic. This paper focuses on the ways in which Brixton Beach, a novel by transnational writer Roma Tearne, explores the intricacies of the Sri Lankan relationship amongst family members …
From Consciousness toward Self-Consciousness
This paper attempts to present the journey of the Byronic Hero’s consciousness toward self-consciousness in “The Prisoner of Chillon” and “Mazeppa”. In this regard, Hegel’s uppermost notion about lordship-bondage as stated in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” is applied to these narrative verses while concentrating on the interaction and relationship of the Byronic Hero and the environment. The lordship-bondage notion, emphasizing freedom, dependency…
From the fringes of the diasporic garment
There is no denying the great power invested in the inventiveness of the diasporic imaginary to reterritorialize Indian culture‐scapes into local contexts. Malaysian and Singaporean Indian diasporic writers are no exception. For a long while, the tendency of most discussions of writings from these countries has been to focus on the syncretism of identity politics of a mainly Hindu experience. Yet, the Indian diaspora in Malaysia and Singapore con…
Transnational Tamil television and diasporic imaginings
The dynamics of globalization and digitization are not only shaping a new media order but also making significant impacts on the cultural dimensions of an older societal order in the case of the Tamil Diaspora. The emerging transnational phenomenon of Tamil television challenges constructed boundaries, contests traditionally homogenized spaces such as those of nation and homeland, questions the principle of territoriality and opens up the sphere …
Reclaiming Space on a Transforming Plantocratic Chequerboard
Reclaiming space on a transforming plantocratic chequerboard: Pierre Boulle’s Sacrilege in Malaya Shanthini Pillai In their introduction to Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler write, “[t]he colonies of France, England and the Netherlands—more ambivalently, of Spain and Portugal—did more than reflect the bounded universality of metropolitan culture: they constituted an imaginary …
The Cultural Unconscious of Peter Hessler as a Peace Corps Volunteer Teacher in River Town
This article investigates the influence of the Peace Corps' salient ideology in Peter Hessler's works focusing on modern China. As a volunteer of the third cohort of the Peace Corps in China, Hessler served in Sichuan province from 1996 to 1998. We argue that the ideological overtones of the Peace Corps programme significantly influence his representation of China and use his memoir River Town as an example. Applying the concepts of the cultural …
Multi-dimensional perspectives of South Indian coolie life in selected memoirs by the European plantocracy of colonial Malaya
This paper traces the multi-dimensional aspects to South Indian coolie life in nineteenth and early twentieth century Malaya to interject into decades of scholarship that has trained on a homogenous focus on plantation fieldwork. In search of the nuances of diasporic diversity, I located three memoirs written by European planters of the Malayan plantocracy, set in rubber plantations and selected primarily for their reflections of South Indian coo…
Unequal discursivities and the symbolic capital of Malaysian Indian scholarship
This paper engages with the aspects of discursive hegemony in terms of both Metropolitan and disciplinary position and privilege, using the sociology of the language that has been produced on Malaysian Indian identity as my point of reference. It contends that these observations and articulations are able to rise to the surface more easily when they are securely located within disciplinary domains often related to determinacy. I argue that viewed…
French and Diasporic Tamil Catholic Mobilities in Colonial Malaya
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Reclaiming Space on a Transforming Plantocratic Chequerboard
Reclaiming space on a transforming plantocratic chequerboard: Pierre Boulle’s Sacrilege in Malaya Shanthini Pillai In their introduction to Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler write, “[t]he colonies of France, England and the Netherlands—more ambivalently, of Spain and Portugal—did more than reflect the bounded universality of metropolitan culture: they constituted an imaginary …
From the fringes of the diasporic garment
There is no denying the great power invested in the inventiveness of the diasporic imaginary to reterritorialize Indian culture‐scapes into local contexts. Malaysian and Singaporean Indian diasporic writers are no exception. For a long while, the tendency of most discussions of writings from these countries has been to focus on the syncretism of identity politics of a mainly Hindu experience. Yet, the Indian diaspora in Malaysia and Singapore con…
Transnational Tamil television and diasporic imaginings
The dynamics of globalization and digitization are not only shaping a new media order but also making significant impacts on the cultural dimensions of an older societal order in the case of the Tamil Diaspora. The emerging transnational phenomenon of Tamil television challenges constructed boundaries, contests traditionally homogenized spaces such as those of nation and homeland, questions the principle of territoriality and opens up the sphere …
From Consciousness toward Self-Consciousness
This paper attempts to present the journey of the Byronic Hero’s consciousness toward self-consciousness in “The Prisoner of Chillon” and “Mazeppa”. In this regard, Hegel’s uppermost notion about lordship-bondage as stated in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” is applied to these narrative verses while concentrating on the interaction and relationship of the Byronic Hero and the environment. The lordship-bondage notion, emphasizing freedom, dependency…
Re-engaging Sri Lanka as a site for reconciliation or a perpetuation of trauma
Memory and home are often at the core of transnational diasporic writings. Transnational Sri Lankan writers are no exception as one often finds that the homeland of Sri Lanka is often the site for memories that jostle between spaces that are both pleasant and traumatic. This paper focuses on the ways in which Brixton Beach, a novel by transnational writer Roma Tearne, explores the intricacies of the Sri Lankan relationship amongst family members …
The Marginalisation of Malaysian Texts in the English Language Curriculum and Its Impact on Social Cohesion in Malaysian Classrooms
In this paper, we seek to investigate the place that local literature has been given in Malaysian Education in the English Language Subject for Secondary Schools in Malaysia. We argue that literature engenders a space for the nation to share in the experiences and feelings of groups and situations that might never be encountered directly. It often engages with the realities of a nation through diverse constructions of its history, its realities a…
Modern Asian ecclesiastical interconnections
This paper explores the dynamics of the modern Asian Catholic ecclesiastical experience in Malaysia within the context of diaspora. Using the South Indian Tamil Catholic community in Malaysia as a case in point, I explore the mediations that occur in ecclesiastical spaces as a result of the points of contact between Catholic Tamil Nadu and its diaspora in Malaysia. Through an analysis of two festivals of ethnic Tamil heritage, the Feast of Our La…
Comparative Constructions of Malaysian Indian Class Dynamics
This article presents a glimpse into the literary writings emanating from a community that has, at best, remained at the margins of global South Asian diasporic literary scholarship: that of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia. It begins with a brief historical overview of the Malaysian Indian community together with an overview and cartography of Malaysian Indian writings. It then develops a comparative analysis of the representation of an issue qui…
The Apostolic Vicariate of Western Siam and the Rise of Catholicism in Malaysia and Singapore
This article examines the emergence of the Catholic Church in Malaysia and Singapore in the modern period through an exploration of the Apostolic Vicariate of Western Siam (1841–1888). The establishment of this Catholic institution—a temporary territorial jurisdiction in missionary regions that precedes the creation of new dioceses—was key to advancing the transition of the Church from its older colonial model towards a modern national Church. Fo…
The Golden Era of the Malaysian Film Industry
The period of the 1950s to the late 1960s has often been touted as the Golden Era of the Malaysian film industry. This paper examines the extent to which films of the Golden Era, specifically P. Ramlee's Sesudah Suboh (1967) and Gerimis (1968), i.e. two significant films of the era which portray stories about inter-ethnic romantic relationships, visualise the possibilities of inter-ethnic engagement through the films' narrative and the implied is…
Space-Time Formations in the South Indian Tamil Popular Film Kannathil Muthamittal
In tandem with the current development of flm scholarships in the area of the world \nand national cinemas, the paper seeks to examine four scenes from the South Indian \nTamil popular flm “Kannathil Muthamittal” (English: A Peck on the Cheek) using \na concept derived from Hamid Nafcy’s theorisation of an accented cinema known \nas the flmmakers’ “preoccupation with the place.” The conception is cinematically \nexpressed through spatial represen…
French and Diasporic Tamil Catholic Mobilities in Colonial Malaya
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Semiotic Technology as Material Resonance of Postcolonial Aesthetics in Digital Children’s Picture Book Apps
Children’s literatures presently are produced widely through media production either as remediation of printed stories or originally produced in digital form. The current most sought after digitized communicative practice of the media is the digital children’s picture book app due to its multimediality and interactivity. This quality of the picture book app paves the path for an aesthetic and cultural transformative exchange. However, these digit…
The Synekism of Catholic Faith and Citizenship in Peninsular Malaysia
In this paper, I focus on the influence of the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris ( MEP ) on the performative poetics of Christian faith and citizenship among Malaysian Catholics. Using the central trope of the house, both in its general context of home and dwelling, and its Christian context of the church as a house of worship, I specifically show how cross-border movements, through intersections of individual, material, and cultural mobil…
Unequal discursivities and the symbolic capital of Malaysian Indian scholarship
This paper engages with the aspects of discursive hegemony in terms of both Metropolitan and disciplinary position and privilege, using the sociology of the language that has been produced on Malaysian Indian identity as my point of reference. It contends that these observations and articulations are able to rise to the surface more easily when they are securely located within disciplinary domains often related to determinacy. I argue that viewed…
Diary of a French Missionary
Reviewed by: Diary of a French Missionary: Penang During the Japanese Occupation by Marcel Rouhan Shanthini Pillai Diary of a French Missionary: Penang During the Japanese Occupation. By Marcel Rouhan, Translated and Introduced by Serge Jardin. Penang: Areca Books, 2021, 224 pp. ISBN 9789675719431 The College General in Penang has stood on Malaysian soil from the onset of the 19th Century, with even earlier links to Thailand reaching far back int…
Navigating Sri Lankan Identity in A State of Crisis
Sri Lanka is often thought of as a nation that has been in a constant state of crisis since the start of its civil war in 1983. However, with the passing of time and various government efforts, there have been attempts to heal the tears in the social fabric. Some of these attempts can be seen in the creation of the National Policy on Reconciliation and Co-Existence, of 2017 as well as the establishment of the Office of National Unity and Reconcil…
Rerouting The Worlding of Inter-Ethnic Estrangement Through Critical Solace
Intergenerational Ambivalence and Negotiations
The millennium is witnessing the emergence of several key feature films produced by Malaysian producers-directors of Chinese ethnicity. Such Malaysian Chinese films comprise a majority of ethnic Chinese as lead actors, who converse predominantly in the Chinese language and consist of narratives that focus on the experiences of the Chinese community in Malaysia. This article seeks to analyse one such film, “The Journey”, directed by Chiu Keng Guan…
Multi-dimensional perspectives of South Indian coolie life in selected memoirs by the European plantocracy of colonial Malaya
This paper traces the multi-dimensional aspects to South Indian coolie life in nineteenth and early twentieth century Malaya to interject into decades of scholarship that has trained on a homogenous focus on plantation fieldwork. In search of the nuances of diasporic diversity, I located three memoirs written by European planters of the Malayan plantocracy, set in rubber plantations and selected primarily for their reflections of South Indian coo…
Developing Cultural Quotient in the Malaysian English Language Classroom
The incorporation of Malaysian Literatures in English into the Literature in English Component of the English Language curriculum has significantly diminished, resulting in its complete absence from Malaysian classrooms. An early examination of prior texts utilised in Malaysian classrooms indicated that the selection of materials inadequately represented Malaysia's multicultural society and the various ethnicities inside the nation. This advanced…
The Cultural Unconscious of Peter Hessler as a Peace Corps Volunteer Teacher in River Town
This article investigates the influence of the Peace Corps' salient ideology in Peter Hessler's works focusing on modern China. As a volunteer of the third cohort of the Peace Corps in China, Hessler served in Sichuan province from 1996 to 1998. We argue that the ideological overtones of the Peace Corps programme significantly influence his representation of China and use his memoir River Town as an example. Applying the concepts of the cultural …
The Flavours of Migration
The concept of resilience in diasporic contexts emphasises how individuals and groups deploy cultural traditions and adaptive tactics to confront hurdles and retain their identities in the backdrop of relocation. Masten underscores the power of endurance in adjusting to notable challenges. In a transnational environment, food functions as an important emblem of resilience, where it connects diasporic individuals to their cultural roots and promis…
The Construction of Archetypal Hero Identity in Selected Asian American Literary Works
This study examines the construction of hero archetypes in three significant Asian American literary works: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Through the theoretical framework of Yinyang philosophy and Jungian archetypal theory, the analysis explores how these texts develop complex hero figures that navigate between Asian and American cultural spaces. The study inves…
Reimagining Heroes in Selected Asian American Literature Through the Lens of Wuxing
This study applies Chinese Wuxing theory to analyze heroes in Asian American literature, focusing on works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. It examines how the five elements—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water—are manifested in character traits and interactions. The research investigates how protagonists embody and balance these elements when facing challenges and conflicts. The study explores how these qualities con…
Sociology (23 works) · Art (16 works) · Literature (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · History (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (12 works) · Narrative (10 works)