Examining Colonial Ideology in Anthony Burgess’s novel Bed in the East

Abstract

This paper tackles the impact of colonization on the Malay colonized society pre-independence period. It exposes British colonialism, a totalizing ideology of control, and the negative representation strategy accomplished by the colonial writer Anthony Burgess’s Novel Beds in the East (1959). This novel was published along with two other stories as a single narrative text entitled The Malayan trilogy (1972). This study aims at examining Malay discourses concerning colonial rule and how European writings (Anthony Burgess) on the Malays could be read in a more nuanced approach and from a non-Eurocentric perspective. The examined text reinforced the differences between the rulers and ruled people to perpetuate the colonial ideology of colonialism and pave the way for the presence of colonial authority. This article concludes that the representation of Malaysia(ns) is set in the colonial texts in which colonialism didn’t only play a vital role in post-colonial literature, but it was behind its existence.