When history refuses a passport: The transnational Malay world in Rida K. Liamsi's Megat

This article examines Rida K. Liamsi's Megat as a representation of a transnational Malay world that extends beyond the boundaries of modern states. It starts from the assumption that history and cultural identity do not always follow the boundaries constructed by nation-states. The study argues that Megat imagines the Malay world as a historical community that had been connected long before the emergence of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The study uses the Transnational Literary Studies approach developed by Paul Jay and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, which views literature as a cultural practice that crosses national borders, together with perspectives from Memory Studies, particularly Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, to explain how collective memory is produced, passed on, and negotiated through literary narratives. The research uses a descriptive-qualitative method and close reading of the novel's narrative structure, representations of space, character mobility, and construction of cultural memory. The findings show that Megat presents the Malay world as a space through which people, language, history, and shared feelings circulate and which cannot be reduced to geopolitical boundaries. The relationships among characters moving across Johor, Melaka, Singapore, and the Riau Islands, together with the reconstruction of Megat Seri Rama as a shared figure of Malay memory, show that cultural identity is rooted more deeply in historical networks than in modern citizenship. Thus, Megat not only reconstructs Malay historiography but also offers another way of reading literature as a medium for preserving collective memory across national borders. The article concludes that Megat is a transnational historical novel that affirms the continuity of the Malay world as a cultural space beyond passports, borders, and states