Biography
Nazry Bahrawi is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian literature and culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. Trained in comparative literature, he specializes in the decolonial study of genre fiction (specifically, folklore, speculative fiction and science fiction) from Southeast Asia and its diasporas in the US and elsewhere. His current research examines the intersections between animal folklores and racial discourses in Malay-Indonesian literary texts, films and visual art under the ambit of Global Asias as method. He has published on indigeneity, racialism, folklore, literary Islam and translation in maritime Southeast Asia in relation to global Anglophone texts and films. Nazry has held visiting fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Brighton, the UK's National Centre for Writing and the Toji Cultural Center in South Korea. He is an editor-at-large at Wasafiri literary magazine for international contemporary writing and serves as a member of the editorial team at Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature. As a literary practitioner, Nazry has translated Malay literary works to English and published short stories.
Research
Selected Research
- Nazry Bahrawi, Joanne Leow and Y-Dang Troeung, eds. Shorelines: Southeast Asia and the Littoral, special issue of Wasafiri, Issue 116, Winter 2023.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Grime to Shine: The Gentrification of Singapore's Vernacular Literature in Translation." Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: The Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia, edited by Phrae Chittiphalangsari and Vicente L. Rafael, Routledge, Jul 2023, pp.165-182.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Indonesia’s 'Sastra Profetik' As Decolonial Literary Theory". Islam and New Directions in World Literature, edited by Sarah R. bin Tyeer and Claire Gallien, Edinburgh UP, 2023, pp. 328-356.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Reading signs and languages as historiography. A review of Syed Hussein Alatas’ Thomas Stamford Raffles". Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 43, no. 1, Jan 2022, pp. 108-10.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Speculative Verses of Islam in Singapore Malay Literature". The Politics of Muslim Identities in Asia, edited by Iulia Lumina, Edinburgh UP, 2022, pp.17-32.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Were-tigers in Were-texts: Cultural Translation and Indigeneity in the Malay Archipelago". Translation Politics in Southeast Asian Literatures, edited by Grace V.S. Chin, Routledge, 2021, pp. 66-81.
- Nazry Bahrawi, editor and translator. Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore. Ethos Books, 2021.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Rindu Rustic: Singapore Nostalgias in Modern Malay Prose". Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, July 2019, pp. 504-520.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Mohsin Hamid's War on Error: The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a Post-Truth Novel". CounterText, vol. 4, no. 2, August 2018, pp. 256-80.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Mecca of Myths: Melaka in Two Hikayats". Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. Special Issue - Postcolonial City: Southeast Asia, vol. 18, no. 2, December 2018, pp. 24-33.
- Mohamed Latiff Mohamed. Lost Nostalgia: Stories, translated by Nazry Bahrawi, Ethos Books, 2017.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "George E. Dutton (ed.). Voices of Southeast Asia: Essential Readings from Antiquity to the Present. Armonk, New York; London, England: ME Sharpe, 2014. 235 pp". TRaNS: Trans-Regional and-National Studies of Southeast Asia, volume 4, no. 2, June 2016, pp. 433-35.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "A Thousand and One Rewrites: Translating Modernity in the Arabian Nights." Journal of World Literature, vol. 1, no. 3, January 2016, pp. 357-70.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Multiculturalism", The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Sangeetha Ray and Henry Schwarz, January 2016. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119076506.wbeps258. Accessed 26 January 2022.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Utopia". The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Sangeetha Ray and Henry Schwarz, January 2016. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119076506.wbeps370. Accessed 26 Jan 2022.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Racialism in the Archipelago". Critical Muslim (Power), vol. 14, C. Hurst & Co., April 2015, pp. 119-28.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Textual Desires: Literature and Islam in the Malay Archipelago". Critical Muslim (Muslim Archipelago), vol. 7, April 2014, pp. 69-79.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Incest Performed: The Neocolonial Perversion of Translation in Malaysia". Translation and Global Asia: Relocating Networks of Cultural Production, edited by Uganda Sze-pui Kwan and Lawrence Wang-chi Wong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2014, pp. 243-64.
- Nadiputra. Muzika Lorong Buang Kok, translated by Nazry Bahrawi, Cokelat, 2012.
- Nazry Bahrawi. "Fictionalizing the Utopian Impulse as Postsecular Islam: An East-West Odyssey". Literature and Theology, vol. 25, no. 3, September 2011, pp. 329-46.