SOURCE: “A Native Worlding: Decolonisation and ‘Race’ in the Poetry of Edwin Thumboo,” in Perceiving Other Worlds, edited by Edwin Thumboo, Times Academic Press, 1991, pp. 269-82.

In the following essay, Ping assesses Thumboo's attempts to break free of the influence of British colonialism in his verse.

If the problem of the twentieth-century, as W.E.B. Dubois has written, is the “problem of the color line”,¹ then it must be especially true for Malaysia and Singapore, where so many communal groups are perched precariously together in a system of balanced pluralism and where ethnic differences are politicised, sometimes sharpened to the edge of antipathy and violence.² Reading the “Perception of Other Worlds” as the perception of Difference—specifically “racial” difference—and bringing the question of “Race”³ to bear on the literatures in English of the two countries, I would argue that, if not explicitly thematicised or described, it...