Introduction

In the previous chapter, the concept of transtextuality was used to trace the complex interaction and movement of filmic texts across cultures through a process of anterior and posterior textual relations. This chapter pursues similar ‘lines of connectedness’ and their involvement with notions of cultural and national identities. Once again it is useful to speak of ‘anterior’ and ‘posterior’ relationships, but in this context those relationships apply to societies and cultures and their participation in the voluntary and/or forced migration of peoples – appropriately encompassed in the concept of transmigration, which the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines as the passage fromone country to another as well as the condition of transition and transformation. This therefore applies both to emigration, with its emphasis on the anterior, departed culture and the ‘mother-country,’ and to immigration, with its focus on the posterior, arriving, domiciled or ‘host’ culture. As will become apparent, ‘newness,’ as referred to by Salman Rushdie and discussed in the previous chapter, is not solely the consequence of arrival and interaction (or lack of interaction); ‘newness’ also occurs as a result of leaving a society, and continues in the subsequent interaction between the departed and the domiciled society and, finally, ‘newness’ also affects the departed society as a consequence of emigration.

Malaysia is a country and society that because of geographic location and historical consequence is crisscrossed by lines of voluntary and forced connectedness as a result of trade, migration and colonialism.