Cultural Geographies of the Malay World: Textual Trajectories in the Indian Ocean (original) (raw)
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Global conjunctions in the Indian Ocean - Malay world textual trajectories: Introduction
Indonesia and the Malay World, 2013
This special issue explores the cultural geography of the Malay world in global context through a focus on texts. The articles are the outcome of a workshop held at the Free University, Berlin on 24–26 November 2011 under the auspices of the Future Philology research programme. The articles are the result of a common effort at reading the language, content, creation, and circulation of texts. The contributors have examined texts in Malay and other languages, including mixtures thereof that emerge from Indian Ocean interactions. While the Malay world may be viewed in relation to various transregional orientations, the focus here is on the interconnectedness with the Indian Ocean. This orientation establishes a parameter within within which global conjunctions are studied at a scale that is sufficiently large to allow for wide ranging explorations without sacrificing attention to the local.
Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities, 2021
This article discusses the limits of received categories in Oriental Studies that emphasise the intersection of texts, philology, classical languages and archaeology. It shows how these frameworks and approaches result in the omission of the architecture of Muslim polities and societies in maritime Southeast Asia. The discussion looks at how historical geographic names and architectural nomenclature can serve as sites for cultural histories, a move that necessitates connections across different disciplinary perspectives. It examines the construction of maritime Southeast Asia through endogenous names and the disciplinary gaze that each name is connected with. This is evinced by their application and circulation in scholarship, moving beyond earlier discussions of the genealogies of geographic names for the region. Following Finbarr Flood, I suggest that the notion of palimpsests as sites for ongoing translations of the past can be extended to the etymology of names for buildings and their architectural elements. Their changing referents or applications serve as an alternative archive that encodes the translation or resignification of maritime Southeast Asia’s pre-Islamic architecture and autochthonous cult buildings for Islamic religious and social use. Examples of such terms for building forms and architectural elements are drawn from mosques, small prayer halls and the features of royal gardens. The recourse to the etymological histories of emic terms for buildings for which textual sources are absent pushes the limits of historical inquiry through a rapprochement with anthropological field documentation as sources of historical information that are typically ignored in Oriental Studies, which privileges literary sources, epigraphy and archaeological remains. This methodological alternative widens the historical horizon beyond the bias towards Indic sources to also consider how autochthonous elements figure in the transcultural formation of architecture in the Islamic period in maritime Southeast Asia. Finally, returning to the geographical names discussed at the start, the article reviews how something so fundamental as the emic names of a ‘region’, which delineate the sphere of cultural interactions as understood endogenously, provide alternative ‘contingent devices’, as Heather Sutherland terms them. This moves us beyond received categories generated by Euro-American scholarship, enabling a more holistic, longue durée view of the connections, circulations and translations that inform architectural culture, and that transcends its disciplinary divisions.
Occidentalism in the Malay World: The West Through the Eyes of Abdullah Munshi
Malay Literature, 2011
This article is about how the West was imagined, described and reproduced by Abdullah Munshi. Thus far we have encountered descriptions of the non-Western world by the West, which includes that of the Malays by European travellers, scientists and colonial scholar-administrators. It is thus also critical to appraise knowledge of the occident from the other and an ambivalent self such as in the person Abdullah Munshi. Abdullah’s writings were journalistic and sociological in nature. The production of his writings under conditions of early colonialism has not been sufficiently studied from the perspective of self and the other, Western and non-Western. As such, this article is significantly the first of such studies on Malay intellectual history. Abdullah’s autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah , is used to identify a form of Malay Occidentalism. In a sense, this article plays a cataloguing role indicating the scope and character of the Malay imagination of the West. It presents part of ...
2011
Bibliography 10 singapore in global history events' but of the ordinary and the prosaic, which together provides an alternative version of the past. It eschews the laudatory tone adopted by some previous works on Singapore, which stress the nation's remarkable economic success in the world. Instead, it situates Singapore within a larger picture as one of many societies attempting to cope with the global movement of a vast number of peoples, ideas, and businesses. Here Singapore is not viewed as an isolated community with unique problems and solutions, but as a society that is always responding and itself contributing to rapid changes fuelled by an explosion of information made possible by the latest technology. Singapore in Global History is a testament to the increasing sophistication displayed by those now engaged in reconstructing Singapore's past. These contributions should be viewed as examples of the way that Singaporeans have sought to explain parts of their past by adopting a global perspective while continuing to acknowledge local agency-an achievement that Jerry Bentley would have appreciated. This is precisely the type of study that is needed to create complementary narratives to balance the dominant political ones that focus on the achievements of the founding fathers of Singapore.
This paper is a preliminary chapter that reflects the overall idea of the research that will be carried out. This research aims to debunk, deconstruct and reassess colonialism, colonial thought on and about the 19 th and 20 th century Malay states. It will concentrate on fictional texts and historical works that discuss the Malays and the Malay colonized states of the 19 th and 20 th century. Some of the texts are Sir Hugh Clifford's fictional writings, Anthony Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy which consists of three novels written in 1956, 1958 and 1959 each. The colonial historical writings on Malaya that will be analyzed are Richard Winstedt's texts that were written at the peak of colonialism. Misconceptions about the Malays and their rulers will be dealt with and given a new reading from the 21 st century Malaysian native intellectuals' point of view. It will be a rereading of the literature and history of 19 th and 20 th century colonial Malaya. There was an unequal binary opposition present in the colonial writings that dictated the idea of the superior West and the inferior Orient. This research will use Postcolonial and Occidental theories to analyze the literature and historical texts. The expected output of this research is a new way of thinking and writing about and deciphering fiction and history on Malaya, from the native intellectual's point of view. The significance of this project is that it will work in educating the society at large (the Malaysians) as well as the international public on the misconceptions of the Malays that were projected by the colonizers. It cannot be denied that there was an unequal binary opposition present in the colonial fictional and historical writings on Malaya that dictated the idea of the superior West and the inferior Malays.
Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests • 117
A T FIRST glance the ISEAS project on nation-building in Southeast Asia seems dated-a hangover from an earlier scholarly preoccupation. In fact, the reverse is the case. In an era in which the nation-state is under attack from one quarter after another-with books bearing such titles as "The End of the Nation State" 1-it is timely to review the processes which constituted the nation in the first place. Today we are getting the analytic distance to appreciate better the constructedness of the nation-state-to see it (as Wang Gungwu puts it) as an "idea". 2 The nation-state cannot now be seen as a taken-for-granted thing. It is a precarious structure, merely one of several options for organizing human communities, and a venture that has always been vulnerable to contest and subversion. In the early twenty-first century there seems nothing inevitable about the triumph of the nation-state. Now more than ever there is reason to identify the different elements in promoting the emergence of nation-states, if only to see more clearly the possible way or ways in which they might eventually fragment and perhaps disintegrate. In this nation-building, the element with which I will be concerned-influenced, as I am, by the writings of the ISEAS project-is the work of the national historian. My focus will be on Malaysia, where there has been exceptional interest in nation-building narratives. Examining this interest, and the different ways in which the "Malaysia" story is emplotted, throws light on the character of the Malaysian nation-state, and on the process of nation-building itself.
The Roar of the Lion in the Literary Jungles of the Malay Archipelago
2014
This article highlights the relationship of Malay literature in Singapore with literature in Malaysia and other countries within the Malay Archipelago. It examines the effects of the secession of Singapore on the 9th of August, 1965 on Malay literature. Has the political separation of almost 50 years truly severed the literary ties between Malaysia and Singapore as far as Malay literature is concerned? Is there a dividing line that can be drawn between Malay culture in Malaysia and in Singapore, as reflected in the literary works produced? Is there still a continuity of the spirit of a common origin? This article attempts to answer these questions by discussing the development of the shared literature before 1965, the effects and themes of “separation” in these literary works, and the levels of development of literature since 1965, as well as the pattern of the literary relationship between Malaysia and Singapore.
Chapters on Asia: Selected Papers from the Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship (2014-2016), 2018
This chapter examines how the Malay Peninsula shaped the ethnological and historical writings of the nineteenth-century British scholar-administrator of Southeast Asia, John Crawfurd (1783-1868), who served as the second British Resident of Singapore (1823-6). By analysing the manner in which he collected his information and made sense of the inhabitants of the region and their history, this paper also offers a closer glimpse on the workings of British, and European, intellectual discourse on foreign places during the colonial period, and invites us to think beyond the simplistic framework of knowledge as a tool of Western imperial domination. This research paper is originally commissioned by the National Library Board, Singapore during the Author's tenure as a Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow attached to the National Library, Singapore during 2016.