IC.

Background: Key postcolonial works are Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, Kwame Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Stuart Hall’s Cultural Identity and Diaspora, and Cartographies of Diaspora by Avtar Brah. Cosmopolitan urban public spaces of significance become focalisation points of postcolonial identity (Ahmad.A, 1992). In the Malaysian context, the experience of transit through public transport necessitates negotiation of relationships around hierarchies of class, and race (King 2008). The researcher explores how the colonial legacy of ‘divide and rule’ is maintained in public consciousness through ghettoization of racial identities as monolithic artefacts that feed a postcolonial social necessity of racial labelling and pigeon-holing. Contribution: “IC” details the human discomfort in the face of racial ambiguity, as framed within the public urban space of negotiating traffic within a taxi. The interspersing of the present dynamic within the taxi with the narrator’s childhood occurring in a separate backstory, serve to illuminate the generational elements present in cosmopolitan postcolonial political realities. Specifically, the obsession with marbles of different colours in the backstory resonate as a metaphor towards skin colour stereotyping. The pathological need to pigeon-hole and label as per someone’s skin colour and race explicates an on-going prevalent reality in multiple urbanised postcolonial nations. Significance: 'Everything About Us’ is an anthology produced in Malaysia and available globally. It is a regular literary production in association with ‘Readings@Seksan’, a reputable, established monthly gathering of Malaysian and global artists, writers, poets and filmmakers. ‘IC’ has been reviewed in The Star, a national daily with a circulation of 250,000, in The Culture Review Mag, and also on GoodReads. It has also been featured on Business FM Radio in Kuala Lumpur, with an estimated 350,000 listeners.<p></p>