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2021 | Buch

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Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia

Critical Perspectives

herausgegeben von: Prof. Zawawi Ibrahim, Dr. Gareth Richards, Prof. Dr. Victor T. King

Verlag: Springer Singapore

Buchreihe : Asia in Transition

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. Taking an inclusive cultural studies perspective, it questions the ideological narrative of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ that dominates explanations of conflicts and cleavages in the Malaysian context. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. ‘Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexities and Hybridities’ takes a range of empirical studies—literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation—to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. This then opens up an examination of ‘Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses’, in which contributors deal with counter-hegemonic social movements—of anti-racism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing—that explicitly seek to open up greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. The third section, ‘Identities and Narratives: Culture and the Media’, then provides a close textual reading of some exemplars of new cultural and media practices found in oral testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. This book is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of identity and nationhood in Malaysia, and for those with wider interests in the fields of critical cultural studies and discourse analysis.

“Here is a fresh, startling book to aid the task of unbinding the straitjackets of ‘Malay’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’, with which colonialism bound Malaysia’s plural inheritance, and on which the postcolonial state continues to rely. In it, a panoply of unlikely identities—Bajau liminality, Kelabit philosophy, Islamic feminism, refugee hybridity and more—finds expression and offers hope for liberation”.

Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge

“This book shakes the foundations of race thinking in Malaysian studies by expanding the range of cases, perspectives and outcomes of identity. It offers students of Malaysia an examination of identity and agency that is expansive, critical and engaging, and its interdisciplinary depth brings Malaysian studies into conversation with scholarship across the world”.

Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia

“This is a much-needed work that helps us to take apart the colonial inherited categories of race which informed the notion of the plural society, the idea of plurality without multiculturalism. It complicates the picture of identity by bringing in religion, gender, indigeneity and sexual orientation, and helps us to imagine what a truly multiculturalist Malaysia might look like”.

Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Introduction

Abstract

This introduction demonstrates how this volume seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. In conceiving the volume, we are advancing an inclusive cultural studies perspective that addresses central issues that, in a Malaysian context, necessarily deal with ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as the dominant ideological narrative to explain societal conflicts, cleavages and contestations. How have hegemonic discourses of identity been rationalised, naturalised and legitimated in the name of certain forms of political power? How far has the critical agency of different social actors been able to challenge and escape from these normative foundations? In addressing these questions, the contributions provide a truly interdisciplinary and critical method to understanding changing meanings of identities ‘on the move’, at both national and subnational levels. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. Part I, ‘Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexity and Hybridities’, takes a range of empirical studies—dealing, inter alia, with literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation—to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. In doing so the chapters posit a more complex, nuanced notion of hybridity and discuss whether this adequately captures these moving identities. This then opens up an examination in Part II, ‘Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses’, in which contributors deal with what can be described as counter-hegemonic social movements and discourses—of antiracism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing—that explicitly seek to claim greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. Part III, ‘Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media’, then provides a close (textual) reading of some exemplars of new (and not so new) cultural practices found in personal (oral) testimony, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative.

Victor T. King, Gareth Richards, Zawawi Ibrahim

Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexity and Hybridities

Frontmatter

Chapter 2. Culture and Identity on the Move: Malaysian Nationhood in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This chapter focuses on images of cultural identity in Malaysia and their modes of representation and classification at different levels or scales of magnitude. This requires an examination of expressions of nationhood, in the context of nation-building, in interaction with identities at the subnational level which comprise what are usually referred to as ethnic groups and categories. Identity and its specific expression in ‘ethnicity’ are forms of social cleavage and a means of organising social and cultural relations and encounters in terms of similarity and difference. It is argued that identity cannot exist apart from the establishment and maintenance of cultural difference and the construction and operation of boundaries, and is generated and sustained in relationships, both at the level of ideas and in practice with others who are perceived to be and categorised as ‘not us’ or ‘other’. In other words, the ways in which identity operates is relational. The Malaysian case is situated in a Southeast Asian context in which the ethnic paradigm has played an important role in the modern social science of the region.

Victor T. King

Chapter 3. The Travelling Text: Manuscripts, Print Culture and Translation in the Making of the Malay World

Abstract

The principal focus for this study is the historic role of linguistic translation in the creation of a multiethnic, multilingual Malay world. Adopting a longue durée approach, it seeks to understand the ways that translators have been deeply implicated in the movement and adaptation of various kinds of knowledge. The analysis makes use of Edward Said’s notion of ‘travelling theory’—and the analogous concept of the ‘travelling text’—to unpack histories of how and why ideas circulated, from situation to situation and from one period to another. The discussion is organised in four main sections. First, the ‘cosmopolises of language’ interprets the significance of long-established, premodern Asian translation traditions, and the impact of Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Sinographic linguistic cosmopolises on the cultural geographies of knowledge in Southeast Asia. Second, ‘in the company of translators’ examines early European forays into the Indian Ocean world and the hybrid forms of ‘useful knowledge’ that were acquired to buttress the quest for spices and souls. Trade and translation went hand in hand. Third, ‘transmitting history’ deals with the carving out of a British Empire in Asia in the eighteenth century and the specific role of Penang, Melaka and Singapore—the Straits Settlements—in this process of imperial expansion. This period gave rise to a discourse we now name as Orientalism as well as the beginnings of the comparative method in linguistics. Fourth, the introduction of the nineteenth-century ‘print revolution’ explores how texts were newly constituted and transmitted, and what effects this had on language, literature and the technology of translation. This history of translation practices is illustrated by the stories attached to exemplary travelling or world texts that circulated the globe and settled and were indigenised in the Malay world. Particular attention is paid to the agency of local writers and translators who acted as traffickers or brokers of the information order that emerged during the colonial period. The concluding argument suggests that the worlds that emerged from the history of translation contained important continuities even across the ruptures created by colonial capitalism. These worlds are inherently plural, cosmopolitan and hybrid—in terms of the cultural geographies of knowledge covered, the identities of the actors involved and the types of knowledge assembled.

Gareth Richards

Chapter 4. In Body and Spirit: Redefining Gender Complementarity in Muslim Southeast Asia

Abstract

This chapter examines ideas of sexual complementarity in formal Islamic discourses, and compares them to cultural perspectives of sexual equality in the Malay world of Southeast Asia based on adat or custom. It argues that Islam does not advocate sexual equality, since it highlights differences of biology, sex and function between men and women. In other words, Islam advocates gender complementarity more than equality, with differences in status and function based in political, jural and domestic leadership. However, the extent to which ideas of complementarity negate or promote women’s empowerment is a more important issue. A predominant indigenous view in Malay society, based on adat, is that the complementarity of sex and gender renders women their own sphere of influence and dominance, which can be as empowering as the public and political roles granted to men through both adat and Islam. This indigenous view opposes mainstream Western feminist theory which advocates gender equality as a necessary universal in modern society. Rather, the argument supports an alternative view that women are significantly empowered as long as they are able to interpret these differences to their advantage by continuing to innovate and take on greater roles in leadership, the economy, their communities and social life.

Wazir Jahan B. Karim

Chapter 5. Our People and the Life of Government: The Quest for the Good Life in the Kelabit Highlands at the Edge of Malaysia

Abstract

The oral history of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak, Malaysia, has remained a muted component of the discourse of national history. Yet, as this case study reveals, it can be a source of insight into the perceptions and aspirations of its multiethnic populations. An oral history collected at a longhouse in the Kelabit highlands of Sarawak, at the margins of the Malaysian nation-state, conveys how crucial the inclusive identity lun tauh (our people) was for the ancestors as they migrated with their allies to find a safe place to live. The history moves on to a time that is called ulun perintah (life of government), which describes their quest for assistance from the agent of the Brunei sultanate in putting down their enemies who lived in Dutch Borneo. In the aftermath, the agency of the ancestor hero Tai Iwan is revealed as he gives (and not pays) tax in the form of wild rubber and leads in peace-making rituals to encourage the tribes living in the headwaters to come down and settle on the main river, within the reach of perintah (government). A common thread that runs through the history is the quest for a good life, ulun nuk doo’. This mission motivates the migrations of lun tauh to find fertile soils for abundant rice harvests, the search for the life of government, with consensus in the community, reinforced by the values of peace-making. This is history garnered through the value indigenous people give to their experiences, which is unlike national and postcolonial histories that represent people on the margins as the helpless victims of colonial and state power. This affirms their agency and their capacity to have an impact on episodes of history.

Valerie Mashman

Chapter 6. Positioning Bajau Identities as Bumiputera: Challenges and Potentials of Leveraging Environmental Justice and Espousal of Islam in Sabah, Malaysia

Abstract

Bajau identity in Sabah, Malaysia, has been a vexed topic because, despite having historically been viewed as a ‘native’ group, Bajau have operated as a minority with respect to other more dominant groups. Aware of the scholarly tendency to treat Kadazan-Dusun-Murut (KDM) as the defining element of contemporary political and cultural life in Sabah, this study treats KDM nationalism as the background to the positioning of discourses and practices of the relatively smaller groupings of Bajau, primarily the coastal sea-oriented Bajau. Important to the background are the gains (although small) made by KDM of attaching identity to place as ‘natives’, disrupting dominant views about being Bumiputera to include non-Muslim as well as Muslim ‘natives’ of Sabah (and Sarawak). Worldwide, such claims to place are often a response to state programmes of territorialisation, providing an avenue for redress of past injustices, albeit limited. For Bajau, identity claims based upon place (a key achievement in the global environmental justice and indigenous rights movements) are difficult to establish over ‘maritories’ (marine territories) as opposed to land-based territories. Expanding on the standpoint that identity claims via the environmental justice movement might be limited for sea-oriented communities, this analysis explores how Bajau (including the Bajau Laut of eastern Sabah) have resorted to other social symbols, in this instance religion, to position their identities. In this regard, this chapter evaluates the view that has been advocated by some scholars, especially Kazufumi Nagatsu, that the bureaucratisation of Islam, via the Bumiputera policy, could provide a potential avenue for Bajau identity positioning and status as Bumiputera.

Fadzilah Majid Cooke, Greg Acciaioli

Chapter 7. Sustaining Local Food Cultures and Identities in Malaysia with the Disruptive Power of Tourism and Social Media

Abstract

Measured by both the number of arrivals and revenues, the direct and indirect contribution of the travel, tourism and hospitality industry has grown exponentially over the past two decades, interrupted only by the coronavirus pandemic, and accounted for over 10% of global GDP in 2019. Tourism is the third biggest contributor to Malaysia’s economy, and food tourism is a major aspect of this; many people travel for a taste of a place. Much of the massification of tourism in Malaysia has been driven by large-scale corporate interests—both Asian and Western—who control key services such as airlines, cruise ships, travel agencies, tour companies, accommodation, and food and beverage outlets. This poses a danger of squeezing local providers out of the lucrative tourism market, including producers of traditional foods. In this context, consumer-generated media are widely recognised as powerful vehicles for destination and sector-specific marketing. They are challenging and disrupting traditional approaches to tourism promotion. Given that access to social media and the internet is relatively inexpensive, are they empowering tools for small-scale local providers to compete in tourism markets? This chapter examines social media’s role in the development of the Malaysian tourism sector, and its relationship with local food cultures and projections of identity. The discussion draws on concepts of ‘creative resistance’ and the ‘transcendence of third spaces’ to situate local producers servicing tourism. It then presents findings from a study of small-scale food providers, coupled with an analysis of websites/blogs/social media platforms which draws out qualitative data from tourists and producers. The data help to establish how social media are being used to transcend core/peripheral spaces. The analysis shows that strengthening product marketing—and creating ‘digital capital’—is a potentially useful way for local food producers to benefit from consumer-driven tourism and sustain local identities and ways of life. In doing so, social media can help disrupt powerful, hegemonic economic forces and globalisation associated with mass tourism.

Sally Everett

Chapter 8. Negotiating Sinful Self and Desire: Agency and Identities of Non-Heteronormative Malay Muslim Men in Malaysia

Abstract

This chapter investigates the sexualities of non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men under the influences of hegemonic Islamic heteronormativity in contemporary peninsular Malaysia. Drawing from the testimonies of 34 non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men gathered through semi-structured interviews, the analysis examines how their sexual practices and identities are intersected by Islamic heteronormative discourses. The findings indicate that their diverse sexualities are the outcomes of their tactful negotiations and navigations through Islamic heteronormative discourses. For these men, Islam is not only an integral aspect of their sense of self; it is also one of the main references for their sexualities apart from popular gay culture. In order to sustain the contradictions, they actively redefine, reframe, bargain and compartmentalise their faith and desire; capitalise on the ironies within Islamic heteronormativity to realise their non-heteronormativity; and, under certain circumstances, bring together the contradicting identities. However, none of these negotiations results in the integration of their faith and desire. The analysis suggests that the sexualities of non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men lie between conforming to and resisting Islamic heteronormativity.

Chua Hang-Kuen

Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses

Frontmatter

Chapter 9. Antiblackness in Malaysia, the Bandung Spirit and African–Asian Decolonial Critique in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain

Abstract

In 1955 the African American writer Richard Wright attended the landmark conference of recently liberated Asian and African nations in Bandung, Indonesia. Arguably, the Bandung conference marked the first conscious gathering of non-European peoples in the modern era that attempted to reshape the world-system of nation-states and economic relations. Today the conference has become an idiom for the desires of African–Asian and Global South solidarity, sometimes referred to as the ‘Bandung spirit’. And yet alongside this stated ideal, there are many racialist contradictions between people of African and Asian descent, both at the level of state-to-state relations as well as in everyday social dynamics. In contemporary Malaysia, the cultural discourse that has emerged concerning the presence of African students and immigrants has been steeped in virulent antiblack racism and violence. These deeply absorbed and redeployed antiblack discourses help to situate Malaysia and Malaysians as complicit in reproducing globalised racial hierarchies based on the tacit acceptance of the deep structures of racist thinking and hierarchies as the basis for social organisation. They plainly go against any putative sense of a Bandung spirit. This chapter reassesses Bandung neither to memorialise or destroy it, but rather to situate it within a larger history and trajectory of modernity’s construction of blackness and postcolonial Asian identity formations. It does so by examining Wright’s search for connection with Third World and Asian anticolonial struggles through a critical reading of his report on Bandung, The color curtain, and drawing parallels with the Malaysian internationalist-oriented writer Usman Awang. Wright’s account of the potential and pitfalls of the Bandung moment of African–Asian solidarity can illuminate how the scourge of antiblack racism has become virulent in Malaysia today. The analysis presented here proposes that the apparent tension between the discourses of antiblack racism in Malaysia and the Bandung internationalist imaginary is amenable to a tense but productive cultural critique.

Mohan Ambikaipaker

Chapter 10. The Emergence of a New Social Movement in Malaysia: A Case Study of Malaysian Youth Activism

Abstract

Much has been written about the emergence of new political dynamics in Malaysia since the watershed 2008 general election. This commentary has focused on the growing role of social movements, the significance of social media, and the form and values of what has been labelled the ‘new politics’. This chapter suggests that there is a gap in the understanding of contemporary youth activism as it contributes to political competition and discourse. Even though there are some studies acknowledging the role of young people in street protests, social media advocacy and cultural activism, few really focus on the youth as their prime subject matter and fewer still deal with youth activism outside formal politics. This chapter examines the actual and potential impact of youth activism on Malaysia’s long-standing consociational politics. The discussion suggests that contemporary political postures and forms of advocacy of young people have to be understood in relation to the long-term process of depoliticisation that has taken place since the 1970s. This depoliticisation was certainly the result of restrictive laws that limited the avenues open to youth activism, both within and beyond student campuses. Concerted calls for Reformasi from 1998 onwards, as well as demands for electoral reform orchestrated by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) since 2007 and the high degree of internet penetration have combined to rekindle the salience of youth activism. This has resulted in attempts by mainstream political parties to highlight youth issues and to encourage their participation in formal politics, with mixed results. The argument contends that recent forms and patterns of youth advocacy differ from those of the 1970s in terms of ideologies, networking and impact on politics in general.

Haris Zuan

Chapter 11. Islam and the Environment: The Challenge of Developmental Politics in Malaysia with Special Reference to PAS’s Rule in Kelantan

Abstract

The standard of living of a particular country is commonly measured by looking at its national income, which has been widely accepted as being broadly indicative of citizens’ material well-being. Progress in the attainment of such well-being reflects in turn the stage of development which that country is currently in. However, since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit of 1992, global concern over environmental damage has somewhat overshadowed national policy makers’ obsession with economic growth. Within the context of Malaysia’s politics of development, environmental problems associated with such phenomena as landslides, floods and haze have become more serious throughout the years. Unfortunately, in Malaysia, only non-governmental organisations (NGOs) openly linked to environmental causes are seen to exhibit any genuine concern over the rapidly depleting natural habitat and flora and fauna, and rising levels of pollution. Entities of the Malaysian state, belying its moderate and even Islamic pretensions, have hesitated to address environmental issues for fear of ruffling feathers that are potentially damaging to political and economic support of the powers at the federal or state levels of government. This is ironic considering that Islam, viewed in comprehensive terms as many Islamists would like to, supposedly abhors neglect or even pillage of the environment. Despite the increasing vociferousness of Islamist civil society in recent years, their response to environmental issues has been surprisingly muted. The discourse on Islam in Malaysia has been unduly dominated by politico-legal issues such that environmental decline, which arguably reflects also a general spiritual malaise, hardly figures among Islamist actors in both the state and civil society. Worse still, in states where Islamists control the government, such as Kelantan, those championing Islam are seen as colluding with capitalist interests to the detriment of marginalised communities that Islam, by right, should be defending. Using empirical data from Kelantan, this chapter seeks to interrogate the manifest failure of Islamism as a political ideology in addressing worsening environmental standards, contrary to oft-cited claims of Islam being a solution to all problems. A lack of spirituality in the programme of activists and parties that purportedly champion Islam is identified as a bane that urgently needs addressing, especially if elements of the Malaysian state are adamant in maintaining Islam as a partner and contributor to development.

Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib

Chapter 12. Alternative or Mainstream? Malay Independent Book Publishing in Malaysia

Abstract

The emergence of a significant number of Malay-language independent publishers in Malaysia in recent years coincided with the spread of ‘alternative’ cultural discourses in relation to music, fashion, activism and lifestyle. Defining terms such as ‘scene’, ‘cool’, ‘hipster’ and ‘rebel’ have been used by official agencies, the media and scholars seeking to describe this cultural phenomenon. At its core, independent publishing positions itself in opposition to the domination of mainstream publishers and the institutionalisation of language and literature championed by the government agency Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. In a self-proclaimed spirit of freedom and celebrating diversity, those involved in independent publishing aim to provide fresh alternatives to the products already in the market while seeking to revolutionise old ways of publishing along the way. The chapter begins with a theoretical discussion on the concepts of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’, developing ideas first articulated by theorists of the counterculture and resistance. Based on participant observation and interviews with key informants, the analysis then critically interrogates the claims made by and on behalf of independent publishers. We argue that independent publishing is merely a new form of competition within the dynamics of capitalism that strategically targets the youth market. Thus the main focus is on commonplace measures such as effective marketing strategies and increased sales as they remain the key measures of success; as such, these strategies are little different from those of larger and more mainstream publishers. The novelty of the discourse or critical messages or resistance conveyed in publications are of secondary or peripheral importance. In short, we suggest that Malay-language independent publishers have become a part of what they themselves claim to oppose. Given the recent downturn in the fortunes of the Malaysian book industry as a whole, the indie moment in publishing may already be a thing of the past.

Muhammad Febriansyah, Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Annuar

Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media

Frontmatter

Chapter 13. Fear and Loathing in Legal Limbo: Reimagining the Refugee in Malaysian Public Discourse and History

Abstract

The dominant public discourse on refugees in Malaysia is characterised by portrayals of refugees as illegal, burdensome and a threat to the nation’s security. Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its related 1967 Protocol and therefore does not provide legal recognition to those who claim refugee status. Nonetheless, Malaysia is host to hundreds of thousands of refugees who live not in camp settings but in the community, most in urban environments. Refugees from Myanmar form the vast majority of Malaysia’s refugee population while smaller, though still substantial, communities are made up of refugees who originate from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. This chapter interrogates key discourses around what a refugee is in Malaysia and how the dominant discourses, or what Michel Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’, construct refugees and link them above all to the pervasive notion of ‘illegality’. The prevailing discourses pertaining to the refugee population are reiterated and shaped by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Malaysian state and its institutions, civil society, the traditional media and other consumable information systems. Here, these depictions are challenged through an exploration of alternative narratives and readings. In recent years stories of Malaysia’s refugee population have begun to emerge in the mainstream media and elsewhere. These accounts have played an important role in developing the refugee as a figure in the national consciousness. Personal stories recorded with refugees living in Malaysia are explored to demonstrate how refugee narratives are shaped by and speak back to the public discourse. The analysis suggests that the binary portrayals of refugees as either victims or agents fail to capture the multiplicity of the refugee experience.

Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Nicole Lamb

Chapter 14. Belonging and Identity in the Narratives of Two Second-Generation Refugee Youths in Malaysia

Abstract

Myanmar refugee communities living in Malaysia have produced a whole generation of stateless children born and brought up in the country. In this chapter we explore the lived experiences of two second-generation Myanmar refugee youths—Prince, a Rohingya boy, and John, a Bamar boy—through their narratives on belonging and identity. Selected excerpts are examined using positioning analysis. A salient aspect in their narratives is the agency to choose for themselves the identities that best enable them to achieve particular goals. There is a complex weaving of two main identities: refugee and Malaysian. The respondents’ experiences and negotiation of identities are not defined by silence and helplessness, as commonly represented in the wider discourses concerning refugees. Common representations of refugees such as ‘illegals’, ‘foreigners’, ‘burdens’ and ‘criminals’ are contested or even manipulated by the respondents as strategic moves that are integral to their efforts for everyday survival and integration.

Charity Lee, Zuraidah Mohd Don

Chapter 15. Expressing Alternative Modernities in a New Nation through Iban Popular Music, 1960s–1970s

Abstract

The Iban are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Sarawak, Malaysia, constituting nearly a third of the state’s total population. They have experienced various forms of modernity since the Brooke Raj established the British colonial presence in 1841, through to its status as a British Crown colony, and then under the auspices of the Malaysian nation-state from 1963 onwards, all of which further incorporated indigenous peoples into national, regional and global relations. Under these different forms of governance—and the far-reaching social, economic, political and cultural transformations they unleashed—the Iban, as a self-defined ethnic group, have both adopted and adapted in recent decades to meet demanding challenges, most notably of nation-building and the idea of ‘independence through Malaysia’. Drawing on a vast cultural heritage, one of the most vital means of projecting Iban responses to change has been popular music. This chapter examines a selection of Iban popular songs composed in the 1960s and 1970s which, we argue, reflected and helped shape the history of Sarawak in that era. Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by Iban-language programming on Radio Sarawak, popular music lyrics carried messages commenting on modernity: the changing relationship to ancestral lands, the impact of development, the rapid acceleration of internal migration and Sarawak’s place in the broader nation-state. In doing so, popular music lyrics offered a historical narrative of Iban people in Sarawak and what an ‘alternative modernity’ meant in a postcolonial world.

Connie Lim Keh Nie, Made Mantle Hood

Chapter 16. Reframing the National Culture Narrative of P. Ramlee

Abstract

The multitalented musician, composer, actor and film director P. Ramlee was immortalised as a Malaysian national icon following his death in 1973. Since then local television stations have frequently broadcast his films from the 1950s and 1960s, numerous hagiographical books about him have been published and memorial museums remind visitors of his artistic achievements. This chapter unpacks the dominant ethnonationalist narrative of P. Ramlee as a national icon through an account of his music, films and ideas. While his film music is a canonical symbol of artistic excellence, it is rarely analysed in conjunction with the immediate historical context in which it was created: postcolonial nation-making. The analysis here shows that his film music was modern, hybrid and cosmopolitan, drawing on various global and local sources. Ironically, P. Ramlee then openly criticised British-American rock ’n’ roll music and culture which had found a ready audience among young people in the mid- to late 1960s. His reactionary posture, along with his declining commercial popularity, led P. Ramlee to become a strident voice for the preservation of local traditional music. His views were then used by the government to support a narrow, homogenous version of national culture. P. Ramlee’s conservative turn has been remarkably resilient. His current cultural positioning is best exemplified in Shuhaimi Baba’s full-length documentary film about him. Here P. Ramlee’s life is dramatically reframed as a tragedy, and used as a vehicle to propagate his conservative reaction to foreign music and his rhetoric of cultural preservation. This in effect undermines the uniquely cosmopolitan contribution of P. Ramlee’s films and music, which exemplifies fluid and heterogenous forms of nation-making, aspects of Malaysia’s cultural history that are often forgotten in official national narratives and the collective memory of citizens.

Adil Johan

Chapter 17. Genre, Gender and Temporal Critique in Budak Kelantan and Bunohan

Abstract

This chapter examines representations of masculinity in relation to notions of temporality in two Malaysian feature films, Budak Kelantan (dir. Wan Azli Wan Jusoh, 2008) and Bunohan (dir. Dain Said, 2011), which are both set in the east coast state of Kelantan. Budak Kelantan is about the reunion of two childhood friends in Kuala Lumpur who have taken different paths in life. One is highly moralistic while the other has strayed from the ‘right path’, and much of the plot is driven by the former trying to help the latter regain his integrity. Bunohan, which draws on elements from kickboxing, gangster and fantastic films, and family melodramas, depicts the homecoming of three estranged brothers who inevitably become trapped in a tangled web of greed, vengeance and violence. In their critique of modernity and representation of marginalised working-class youth masculinities, both films utilise and invoke Kelantan’s traditional art forms. Budak Kelantan deploys dikir barat (a traditional musical form) as a stylistic element to accentuate moments of masculine emotional anxiety and nostalgic desire for traditional kampung life. Bunohan intricately interweaves Kelantan’s art forms with traditional magic and healing and mystical folklore. In this respect, both films induce a nostalgic longing for a place that has been lost due to rural–urban migration. Through a close reading of the two films, I argue that both offer forms of counter-narrative through their representations of troubled and anxious masculinities (and the women onto whom they are projected or who are forced to mediate them), while at the same time reflecting on and critiquing the reified gender binaries born of Malaysia’s Islamisation, Western modernity and linear, homogeneous time.

Norman Yusoff

Chapter 18. Left of the Dial: BFM 89.9 Independent Radio Station and Its Indie Rock-friendly Midnight Programming as a Site of Sustainability

Abstract

Since its inception in 2009, Business FM (more popularly known as BFM 89.9) has been gaining traction and found an audience among urban, middle-class and English-speaking residents of the Klang Valley (Greater Kuala Lumpur region), Malaysia. This demographic is what could also be defined as the core group of indie production and consumption. While the station’s main content and programming are focused on business and economics (as the name suggests), being Malaysia’s sole independent radio station also allows it to practise and adhere to journalistic standards and incisive radio journalism sorely lacking in other commercial radio stations. BFM 89.9’s indie status has played a vital role in challenging the standard notion of what a radio station should be in Malaysia’s tightly regulated media industry. Although adopting a classic rock playlist format, the station has also become an important platform for indie music (indie rock in particular) in almost all of its local permutations in its night-time and midnight programming. This chapter explores the discourse of ‘indie-ness’ in the Malaysian context and how BFM 89.9’s original local music programming serves as a site of rock sustainability that contests and opens up on-air space for independent musicians and listeners alike.

Azmyl Yusof

Chapter 19. Postcolonial Indigenous Storytellers and the Making of a Counter-discourse to the ‘Civilising Process’ in Malaysia

Abstract

This chapter explores two postcolonial indigenous storytellers from the historic margins of the Malaysian nation-state. The first is the late Mak Minah (Menah Anak Kuntom), a Temuan woman who learned songs of the forest from her husband and kin, and later joined forces with non-Orang Asli musicians to form a fusion band, Akar Umbi, and became the first Orang Asli storyteller to sing to a wider public. In contrast, Akiya (Mahat Anak China), the author of Tuntut (Claiming), Perang sangkil (The slave-raiders’ war) and Hamba (Slave), comes from a younger and better educated generation of Orang Asli. The analysis presented here suggests that through their creative works, performance and discursive practice, indigenous storytellers are subverting what Norbert Elias calls ‘the civilising process’. In both the anthropological literature and the practices of indigenous governance of the British colonial state and the postcolonial nation-state, ‘civilising the margins’ has generally been identified with policies that assumed the state’s role as bearers of progress (read: ‘civilisation’, ‘development’) towards the allegedly ‘backward’ (‘primitive’) Orang Asli communities. These two variants of the ‘civilising process’ are examined to demonstrate how they further marginalised the Orang Asli and ruptured their sense of identity, dignity and social worth. The critical subtext of Mak Minah’s and Akiya’s storytelling interventions is that they represent indigenous people’s assertion of agency, empowering a sense of identity and ontology, which embodies their rights to humanity and self-esteem, their desire for participatory development and, most of all, their historical pursuit of peace and love. In the context of an evolving Malaysian nation-state, its grand narratives and dominant discourse have constantly denied the Orang Asli these rights. This chapter argues that the narratives and discursive content of storytelling as articulated by Mak Minah and Akiya constitute a remaking of an indigenous postcolonial discourse aimed at ‘civilising the centre’.

Zawawi Ibrahim

Chapter 20. Conclusion

Abstract

The conclusion emphasises the Malaysian preoccupation with race and ethnicity, but also provides a reminder that there is a range of other identities and actors or agents oriented to issues of gender, youth, environmentalism, migrant workers, refugees, marginalised subcultures, artistic productions and the media. It presents a rehearsal of the concept of discourse and its relationship to narrative, and the distinctions between self and identity, primordialism and constructivism, and between analytical models of and for sociocultural and political organisation. As for the future, there is a return to Abdul Rahman Embong’s quartet of concepts, and an expression of the hope that, in the short term, Malaysia remains in ‘stable tension’.

Victor T. King, Gareth Richards, Zawawi Ibrahim

Backmatter

Titel: Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia
herausgegeben von: Prof. Zawawi Ibrahim
Dr. Gareth Richards
Prof. Dr. Victor T. King
Verlag: Springer Singapore
Electronic ISBN: 978-981-334-568-3
Print ISBN: 978-981-334-567-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3