Introduction: The Biosemiotic Turn and Malaysian Ecocriticism

In assembling a variety of textual analyses, this ecocriticism reader argues that biosemiotics constitutes a key framework for understanding Malaysian literature. As a methodology of reading which examines the ways in which nature and culture co-evolve and co-develop via the mutual reading and interpretation of signs, various discourses can be re-read, interrogated and critiqued in a new light. Through several readings of various texts using different epistemological approaches, whether oral narratives, (graphic) novels, life-writings or short stories, we collectively foreground their ecological representations. Rather than treating these ecologies as mere background settings, we argue that these should be considered as being agentic in themselves. Thus, textual ecologies constitute key aspects of understanding such narratives. By paying close attention to the Malaysian context, particularly the centrality of identity, land, labour and extractive capitalism to the (post)colonial state, this reader problematises the illusory nature—culture dichotomy to focus on the making of other worlds and ecologies—that is to say, mutually entangled realities and networks, inter- and multispecies relationalities as well as the legibility of a local universe of signs.