Hilary Tham, primarily known as a Chinese-Malaysian-American poet, makes use of her rich Asian-Chinese heritage in the various anthologies she has written throughout her life in America. She plays the role of cultural mediator by translating cultural artefacts she grew up with and aspects of the American culture she has embraced. In this paper, we explore the way Tham negotiates her multiple cultural identities through her selected poems by employing cultural translation as a lens. In the analysis, the translation of multiple cultures is centered thematically on food culture, parenting culture, old age culture, ancestor worship culture, funeral culture, and expression of love culture. We argue that the hyphenated identities negotiated in Tham’s selected poems are heterogeneous, multifaceted, polyphonic, and never unilateral by characterization. Although Tham is conscious of her role and agency as a cultural mediator in communicating the cultural differences of Asian-Chinese immigrants to her American audience, she negotiates the imbalanced power relations in most of the cultural issues and problematizes the “in-betweenness” of cultural identities, which culminates in the creation of a “Third Space” that fuses the East and the West as part of her cultural being. By way of implication, the focus on hyphenated identities through the lens of cultural translation contributes to the creation of cultural consciousness and mutual understanding of cultural variations between East-West cultures in Asian and American communities.
Bassnett, S. & A. Lefevere. (1998). Constructing Cultures: Essays On Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Bery, A. (2007). Cultural Translation and Postcolonial Poetry. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Bhabha, H.K. (2006). Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences. In Ashcroft, B. G. Griffiths and Tiffin, H.(Eds.). The Post-Colonial Studies Readers (pp.155-157). New York: Routledge.
Chan, K.S. (2012). A Localized Culture of Welfare: Entitlements, Stratification, and Identity in a Chinese Lineage Village. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Chua, A. (2011). Battle Hymm of the Tiger Mother. London: Bloomsbury.
Fadillah, M., Ruzy, S. H., Ganakumaran, S., and Raihanah M.M. (2004). Voices of Many Worlds, Malaysian Literature in English. Kuala Lumpur: Times Edition.
Hall, S. (2003). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Eds.). Theorizing Diaspora (pp. 234-236). United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing.
Katan, D. (2004). Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators (2nd edition). London: Routledge.
Lambert, J. (2008). Medieval Translation and Translation Studies: Some Preliminary Considerations. In M. Goyens, P. d. Leemans and A. Smets (Eds.). Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe (pp.1-10). Belgium: Lueven University Press.
Lian, Y.S. (2013). New Chinese Immigrants in Japan: Cultural Translation and Linguistic Hybridity in Yang Yi’s and Mao Danqing’s Japanese Language Writing. Japan Language and Literature.Vol.47(2),193-234. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24394346.pdf (last accessed 5 July 2016).
Maitland, S. (2017). What is Cultural Translation? London: Bloomsbury.
Munday, J. (2016). Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications Fourth Edition. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.
Nor Faridah, A. M., & M.A. Quayum. (2003). Colonial to Global: Malaysian Women’s Writing in English 1940s-1990s. Kuala Lumpur: International Islamic University Malaysia.
Ratnasiri S., & Bandara J. (2017). Changing patterns of meat consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in Australia: Will kangaroo meat make a difference? PLOS ONE 12(2): e0170130. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0170130
Siti Aishah, K.A. (2005). A Critical Analysis of Hilary Tham’s Memoir Lane With No Name Based on Her Poetic Works: A Gynocritic Reading. Dissertation M.A. National University of Malaysia.
Tham, H. (1987). Paper Boats. Washington, D.C: Three Continents Press.
Tham, H. (1989). Bad Names for Women. Washington, D.C: Word Works Capital Collection.
Tham, H. (1992). Tigerbone Wine. Washington, D.C: Three Continents Press.
Tham, H. (1994). Men and Other Strange Myths: Poems and Art. Colorado: Three Continents Press.
Tham, H. (1997). Lane With No Name: Memoirs and Poems of a Malaysian-Chinese Girlhood. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Tham, H. (2000). Counting. Washington, D.C: Capital Collection. The Word Works.
Tham, H. (2001). Reality Check and Other Travel Poems and Art. Florida: Kings Estate Press.
Tham, H. (2003). The Tao of Mrs. Wei. Washington, D.C: The Bunny and the Crocodile Press.
Wang, N. (2003). Globalization, cultural studies and translation studies. In Roland Robertson and Kathleen E.White. (Eds.). Globalization: Specialized applications and resistance to globalization, (pp. 29-38). London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis.
Wang, N. (2008). On Cultural Translation: A Postcolonial Perspective. In Wang Ning and Sun Yifeng (Eds.) Translation, Globalisation and Localisation A Chinese Perspective, (pp.75-87). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Wolf, M. (2000). The Third Space in Postcolonial Representation. In S. Simon and P. St.Pierre (Eds.) Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (pp.127-146). Canada: University of Ottawa Press.
Xu, W. Y. (2008). Eating Identities:
In-Text Citation: (See, Hashim, & Raihanah, 2018)
To Cite this Article: See, K. S., Hashim, R. S., & Raihanah, M. M. (2018). Negotiating Hyphenated Identities in the Selected Poems of Hilary Tham. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 8(8), 659–673.
Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
