ABSTRACT
A concluding chapter needs to look both backwards and forwards: to trace the route that a literary history has travelled, and also to look speculatively towards the future. In the course of our narrative, we have frequently encountered notions of technological modernization, social modernity, and modernist literary or artistic movements. Our literary history began with an account of how work in English by writers from Southeast Asia had its origin in British and American colonialism, which presented itself rhetorically as a modern form of government, bringing the fruits of the Enlightenment to subject peoples: those struggling against colonialism, in turn, did so by claiming modernity as their own. We conclude first with a retrospective account of the extent to which notions of the ‘modern’, in its many refractions (modernity, modernization, modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism) have a bearing on Anglophone literary developments in Southeast Asia, and especially to how those notions blend with, and at times challenge, contemporary ideas about cosmopolitanism and intercultural hybridity. We then move to an examination of how such concepts intermesh with changing technologies of reception and production, and how digital technologies in particular have challenged both linguistic boundaries and divisions between elite and mass culture.
