The Malaysian Nationalist Novel in English: A Reading of Adibah Amin's This End of the Rainbow

Abstract: In this article I argue that the Anglophone novel can never really be nationalist because, in attempting to homogenize the multi-ethnic characters, the nationalist discourse is perpetually in conflict with the inherent heterogeneity of the very people that it aimed to collectively gather by forwarding the binary of colonizer-colonized. By using Benedict Anderson's "imagined community" as my main contestation point, I investigate through the reading of a Malaysian Anglophone novel, This End of the Rainbow (2006), the pitfalls present in both the "deep" and "horizontal" comradeship expounded by Anderson.