Applying Syed Hussein Alatas's Ideas in Contemporary Malaysian Society (original) (raw)
Related papers
Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group Association for Asian Studies, 2024
Letter from the Chair We are again looking forward to a strong line-up of panels and papers with Malaysia, Singapore, or Brunei content at this year's Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies. The virtual meeting will be held on March 1, while the in-person conference will take place in Seattle on March 14-17. This year, the MSB Studies Group is sponsoring the panel "Race and Racialization in British Southeast Asia". This is one of four panels, one roundtable and 32 papers that have Malaysia, Singapore, or Brunei content as their primary or sole focus. In addition, there are two papers in the virtual session that is on Malaysia. In this issue of Berita, we provide all the panel details, chronologically.
What K.J.Ratnam once called the 'communal framework' -with its strong racial or ethnic basehas been dominant in virtually every aspect of Malaysian life over many decades. It is not, however, the only paradigm that has been proposed for Malaysia -or Malaya, or the 'Malay World'. Nor is it simply the product of demographic fact. The structure and the dominance of this paradigm is in part a product of ideological engineering. This lecture will reflect on the origins and development of the dominant paradigm -taking note of the way it gained influence, and also the competition it faced. Surveying the history of the Malaysian paradigm can help us not only to appreciate its strength -its capacity to resist transformative change -but also to identify where alternative concepts, discarded in their time, may prove influential in the future. There are good reasons why Malaysia is structured the way it is today -but on close examination neither this nor any other specific national formation can be judged inevitable. The historian who examines the 'history of ideas' in nation making therefore has an opportunity to engage in conversations about the future as well as the past.
The Developing Economies, 2016
There was great excitement in the Malaysian scholarly community and among many politically minded people over the results of the 12th General Elections of 2008 when the ruling alliance lost its two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time. 1 This shook the bedrock of racial politics in Malaysia, where UMNO, a Malay party, dominated all the other racially oriented non-Malay component parties, as there has always been a belief that the ruling party must have a two-thirds majority for it to be a legitimate government, even if the constitution allows the party that has a simple majority to form a government. The 13th General Elections in 2013 confirmed that this result was no fluke. The ruling alliance lost not only their two-thirds majority but also the majority of the popular votes, although it managed to obtain a simple majority of parliamentary seats through a system that has been politically gerrymandered. For the first time in many years, the racial paradigm as the dominant paradigm in Malaysian politics and in many other aspects of Malaysian life could be questioned, and competing paradigms could be realistically considered. This book attempts to do this. It is the latest in a series of collaborative book projects from Pok Rafeah, Chair of the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS) of the National University of Malaysia. The lead editor of the book is Anthony Milner, who once held the Chair of the Institute, and the two other editors are Rahman Embong and Tham Siew Yean who are Fellows of the Institute. The book examines the origin and influence of the racial paradigm and alternative paradigms in various aspects of Malaysian life. It consists of eight chapters, including the Introduction, all of which are written by Fellows of the Institute.
This article argues that recurring communal problems in Malaysia can be traced to not only economic and social policies undertaken by pragmatically rather than ideologically-inclined National Front-led governments, but they can also be located to weaknesses of their educational policies which have failed to disentangle Malaysians from colonial knowledge which had epistemologically moulded the conceptions of 'race' and 'nation' as prevalent in Malaysia. The article seeks to show that, despite the apparent success of Malaysia's national education system in producing a relatively large number of skilled and semiskilled workers who went on to form constantly expanding vibrant middle classes, these cohorts of new labour market entrants have largely failed to live up to expectations of them as socially progressive in the way envisaged by Wawasan 2020 – a liberal, rational, inclusive, scientific and progressive Malaysian nation. As a matter of fact, after fifty years, Malaysia's educational system remains unsuccessful in tackling its twin problems before independence – communal and class polarisation. We hereby argue that the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025, notwithstanding the hulabaloo which accompanied its launching, not only also fails to confront the critical issue of identity and nation-building, but it also lacks credible solutions beyond the colonial-designed educational framework which accepts communal divisions as a fait accompli.
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Malaysia's Neo-Conservative Intellectuals
Pacific Affairs, 2013
Abstract: This article discusses the role played by neo-conservative intellectuals during the tenure of Malaysia's fifth prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (2003-2009). Abdullah's leadership was distinguished by two qualities which arguably qualify it as “neo-conservative,“in terms of revival of policies from a bygone era and the launching of political reforms within the framework of a conservative regime led by the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) party. Using the theoretical experiences of dominant ...
Rebirth: Reformasi, Resistance, and Hope on the Road to New Malaysia
2020
The Strategic Information and Research Development Centre (SIRD) is an independent publishing house founded in January 2000 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The SIRD list focuses on Malaysian and Southeast Asian studies, economics, gender studies, social sciences, politics and international relations. Our books address the scholarly community, students, the NGO and development communities, policymakers, activists and the wider public. SIRD also distributes titles (via its sister organisation, GB Gerakbudaya Enterprise Sdn Bhd) published by scholarly and institutional presses, NGOs and other independent publishers. We also organise seminars, forums and group discussions. All this, we believe, is conducive to the development and consolidation of the notions of civil liberty and democracy. Contents iii
In examining the discourse of national consciousness and nation building in Malaysia, studies often focus only on sources from the socio-political and economic realm. Consequently, the analysis drawn may be problematic and unrepresentative due to elite voices that tend to dominate these domains. An alternative source not given due attention is the literary realm. Ideas propagated by literary intelligentsia are often undermined as ungrounded fiction narratives that are irrelevant in the analysis of real-life problems. Thus, literary works tend to be appreciated only for its aesthetic literariness.
Edmund Terence Gomez (ed), Politics in Malaysia: The Malay Dimension
East Asia, 2007
Ever since independence in 1957, Malaya, and then Malaysia, has been the venue of a strangely ambiguous project. The postcolonial state has been made to serve an inherently contradictory purpose: as the instrument and arena for the belated accomplishment of as much of the agenda of an early twentieth century exclusivist and exclusionary Malay nationalism as modern conditions will permit; as much, that is, as a modern, multicultural and more than solely Malay society can be persuaded, cajoled, and even craftily induced to accept. While predominantly (about 60 percent) Malay, Malaysian society is ineradicably diverse, but the modern state since independence, impelled by ever more bold politically-driven interpretation of the independence constitution, is avowedly “Malay-centric”, even Malay-dominant. For Malaysia’s cultural energy, social vitality and economic dynamism, the nation’s ethnic diversity is overwhelmingly a boon and a blessing; but for the unrepentant latter-day Malay nationa
The maelstrom of excitement for an ‘Islamic way of life’ during the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s has injected ‘Islamic perspectives’ on development as a supposedly serious contender in discourse. Initially, proponents of the ‘Islamic way’ of development presented their model as a purer, more tauhidic and therefore more moral order, contrasted to the Western-derived capitalism underpinning mainstream policies. They also often times condemned the latter as breeding social injustices, due to it being based on Western ideologies taken to be aspiritual or even anti-religion. Yet by the beginning of the new millennium, the paths of these two models began to converge, bringing them into a situation which might be justifiably considered as frenmity . In such a situation, the nature of their ideological relationship became more ambiguous, as contradictions and similarities between the two may overlap simultaneously. Such convergence is arguably made possible through the strong hand of the state under the leadership of Mahathir Mohamed between 1980s-90s. This paper is therefore a preliminary attempt to examine the evolution in ideological dynamics between the proponents of these two forms of developmental models within these three decades.