The Last Bastion of Ingei by Aammton Alias

This article posits gothic depictions of the haunted forest as important counter-narratives to extractivist representations of nature in public narratives in Brunei, including government policy and advertising for environmental tourism.The critical discussion will focus on a contemporary Bruneian text, Aammton Alias’sThe Last Bastion of Ingei(2016). Hence, I argue that this novel offers a valuable critique of the conditions of postcolonial identity through contested powers, spaces and voices through its speculative narrative plot. To this end, a unified nation is yearned for via speculative scenes of reconciled relations of its family members.

Furthermore, a dystopian world of conflict is rejected in an ultimate desire for utopian peace and happiness as the novel calls for a suturing of social and racial divisions. A further revival of the cultures of indigenous Malays, non-indigenous Ibans, and Penans within Brunei exhibits the extent to which the novel’s project of decolonization is promoted. I contend that the hybridity of human-hanturelations functions as a strategy of resistance by collapsing demarcated boundaries between self and alien other. The novel delineates the way that a colonial mindset undermines indigenous and minority identities. Employingthedouble lines of enquiry provided by the Orientalist colonial gaze and ideology of progress, I discuss symbolic and materialist aspects of the violent processes of othering experienced within the Bruneian nation. Espousing themes, language, representations and perspectives that are particular to Brunei, these novels engage Malay masculinity in ways that shed light on local-global tensions and contestations about masculinities and, correspondingly, gender and sexual identities.This paper examines an Anglophone Bruneian novel,The Last Bastion of Ingei (2016),by Aammton Alias, as postcolonial speculative fiction. Straddling both local and global ideologies and discourses, how do contemporary Bruneian authors represent gender and sexuality in anglophone fiction? This chapter examines how gender and sexual identities are imagined and articulated through fantasies of Malay masculinity in two male-authored anglophone science fiction novels: Amir Falique’s The Forlorn Adventure (2013) and Aammton Alias’s The Last Bastion of Ingei (2016). As a result, ideas and views of gender and sexuality are changing or adapting to contextual and contingent forces in the country and beyond. Despite the growing conservatism in recent years with regard to gender and sexual identities, Brunei Darussalam is also a developing and modernising society that has access to global discourses and images of gender and sexuality in addition to Eurocentric narratives that celebrate equality and freedom.

The Last Bastion of Ingei by Aammton Alias