Transnational Allegory, Domestic Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Cosmofeminine Space in Shirley Lim’s Joss and Gold

Allegories are literary tropes that can be strategised to mediate our readings of hegemonic historical past as an open discourse subject to imaginative reconfiguration. Writing from culturally deterritorialised spaces, the Malaysian-American writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim allegorises, in her novel Joss and Gold (2001), the bildungsroman of the Chinese-Malaysian female protagonist Li An. Li An moves from interracial scandal to autonomy and empowerment in a manner that disavows forms of victimisation that occur in Orientalist narratives such as Madame Butterfly and nationalist myths. The novel articulates the transformative powers of fiction, through allegorical juxtapositions and motifs drawing parallels between Li An's past life in Malaysia where polemical politics confine her to essentialised ethnicity while neglecting her hybrid cultural upbringing under British education, and her present life in Singapore where she has fashioned, in what I call 'domestic cosmopolitanism,' a subject self that bridges feminist ethics of care with cosmopolitan ideals. The novel's construction of domestic cosmopolitanism rests on its disruption of binary categories of the public and the private, the past and the present, and the local and the transnational, which constitutes, amidst corresponding ambivalence, the envisioning of a cosmofeminie space. Joss and Gold thus opens up readings of Asian women beyond Orientalist and nationalist victimology, as well as reinstates the productiveness to engage with gendered processes of globalisation.