Paper short abstract:

My presentation explores the question of territorialization in the case of the Chinese-Malaysian-American author Shirley Geok-lin Lim and the manners in which self-representation and the mapping of one’s territory are being performed in online spaces.

Paper long abstract:

For those familiar with the work of the Chinese-Malaysian-American author Shirley Geok-lin Lim, the exploration of herself as deterritorialized has been at the heart of her nonfictional writing. Looking backwards to her memoir Among the White Moon Faces (1996), whose final paragraph conveys the promise that the “absence of place, [her]self absent where [she] live[s]” have come to an end with Lim’s move to the West Coast, my presentation seeks to study the different manners in which contemporary identity and the narrative anchoring and mapping out of a territory for the self are being represented and performed in an online environment. By examining Lim’s Facebook posts and conversations, I will limn her self-writing as it expands from traditional forms to encompass more innovative multimedial online experiments. I will focus on the material affordances and constraints through which self-mapping is expressed and demonstrate that it is indeed as a posting, networked and tagged self, claiming virtual space for herself and for her readers/“friends,” thriving in hybrid linguistic and cultural practices and spaces that Lim has reached viable accommodations and expressions of self. Finally, what this most strikingly conveys is how virtual deterritorialization is signified as empowering for somebody who has always fought labels and categories, complicating notions of belonging, community or affiliation.