In 14 thrilling stories about desire, faith, and ideology, The Unrepentantcaptures the revolutionary fervor of Malaya at a formative time for Southeast Asia.
In Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore), when the British imposed the Emergency to crush leftist and independence movements, the insurgents fought back with ingenuity and ferocity. The Unrepentanttells the stories of these insurgents who loved, doubted, grieved, and hungered amid a revolution. A guerilla draws a priest into the cause. A translator debates the language of the revolution. A tin miner falls in love. A brother aspires to be Malaysia’s first cosmonaut. An exile returns home.
From the tropical night of the jungle to shophouse flats, in which the war for Malayan liberation was imagined and fought, these intimate stories span the 1940s to the 2010s and challenge archival perspectives of the period, blurring the borders between fiction and fact, history and memory. Braiding together the diverse perspectives of Chinese and Malay communists, Tamil estate laborers, Third World movie-makers, and leftist Christian movements, The Unrepentant pulls the reader into a recent past that still echoes into the present.
About the author
Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, and grew up in Johor Bahru. Her short stories and writing on literature, art, and history have appeared online and in print. She is the editor-in-chief of SUSPECT, a journal of Asian literature and art. She holds an MA in history from Nanyang Technological University and is currently pursuing a joint PhD in Southeast Asian studies (National University of Singapore) and history (King’s College London). Her current academic project focuses on indigeneity, state-making, and more in twentieth-century Sabah, while her research interests include anticolonial movements, agricultural histories, orality, and the history of revolutionary Christianity in the Global South. The Unrepentant is her first longform work, and she is currently working on a novel that brings her back to Sabah.