Since the turn of the 21st century, popular TV fiction in Malaysia has been thriving, popular, and critically-acclaimed due to their extensive local, national reach. Drawing more than one million viewers including staggering online reruns, this sheer popularity of some popular TV fiction has led to the questioning of issues that viewers can relate to. In this paper, we contextualize popular TV fiction within a space of cultural identities, focusing on audience-response analysis. Specifically, we argue that these popular TV fiction permit audience to communicate with images of social imaginary as seen in Julia, Adam & Hawa, and On Dhia, articulating issues related to controversies and taboo such as alcoholism and cohabitation. Through diverse audience voices captured from interviews and personal narratives, we will show how their reactions reveal the intricacies of dealing with Malay subjectivities. By telling their stories, we also show how these audience responses may reflect cracks and fractures, between what is supposed to be shown and the reality in which these expectations are translated in popular TV fiction.

The National Higher Education Strategic Plan of Malaysia focuses on graduates who are innovative and knowledgeable to meet the standards and challenges of 21st century. This paper, then, explores how an innovation practice has taken place in a course entitled “Gender Identities: Malaysian Perspectives” where students scrutinize gender across Facebook “texts,” as opposed to using literary texts. By using Facebook as baseline data to analyze online gender construction, students have learned the ways in which cyberspace deconstructs certain parameters of identity construction. Following this premise, this article discloses how students analyze gender identities. They analyze Facebook accounts of a male educator in United States, a female Malaysian college instructor residing in United States, and a law/politics Malaysian undergraduate. Firstly, the students revealed that identity in Facebook spaces is shown through genuine names and profile pictures; rightfully so for job, networking, and relationship purposes. Secondly, by selecting specific audiences, negotiating identities of a friend, co-worker, lover and most importantly future employee in Facebook is a difficult task. Conflicts usually occur while “masking” certain information on Facebook as they go about connecting with friends, students, parents, and prospective partners. Thirdly, societal constraints limit opposite gender’s approval of friend requests. Lastly, identity construction reveals that having voices and emotions on Facebook have both positive and negative implications. Pedagogical recommendations are also presented as a result of this inclusion of Facebook in literature classrooms.

The fluid realities of youth in postcolonial nation-states can reflect changing and challenging landscapes. Their engagements with environment, for example, are not only elaborated in social, political, and economical contexts, but also generated through values, beliefs, and identities. This article adds to contemporary debates by positing that discussions on postcolonial civic identities have to be accompanied by youth narratives and their considerations on nature, time, and digital world(s) by taking Malaysian youths as examples. Specifically, it attempts to theorize youth civic identity within postcolonial context(s) by scrutinizing personal narratives that are symbiotically yoked with discourses on ecology and technology. Through administering personal narratives at a suburban district in West Peninsular Malaysia, this paper opens ‘windows’ into what it means for youths to participate in civic projects. Reading these narratives from the lens of growth into citizenship, their wide-ranging experiences in civic affairs can be understood in four ways, namely, recognition, responsibilities, reconciliation, and reciprocity. Two of these emerging themes, recognition and responsibilities, will be discussed in this article. Our attempt at depicting postcolonial civic identity, therefore, is part of a large-scale investigation on civic mindedness that will compel us to reflect on unofficial, continuous accounts of youth reflecting on a sense of belongingness and what the future might bring.