Revisiting Malaya: Uncovering Historical and Political Thoughts in Nusantara
Malaysian Studies Series No. 1
"The contents of this volume go a long way to furthering our understanding of many dimensions of the difficult issues involved, including the national question." Jomo Kwame Sundaram.
The concept of ‘Malaya’ continues to exert a powerful draw on our imagination, steeped in exotism and Orientalist reductions. Even decades after the end of the colonial period, it casts a long shadow over modern-day Malaysia and the rest of maritime Southeast Asia. How can we understand this constantly transforming subjectivity? Most importantly, how do we recognise the continuation of problems inherited from colonisation, and overcome these distorted discourses?
Revisiting Malaya seeks to explicitly address these problems, taking regional Cold War divisions and historical links and fractures into consideration. By considering a wide range of topics presented by speakers at two landmark conferences, from the propaganda efforts of the Malayan Film Unit to the visionary writings of visionaries and revolutionaries, ranging from Usman Awang to Tan Malaka, this book uses ‘Malaya as method’ to better understand historical and contemporary realities.
Show Ying Xin is a postdoctoral fellow at the Malaysia Institute, Australian National University and lecturer at ANU's School of Culture, History & Language. She received Ph.D. in literature from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is interested in Southeast Asian history and literature, and her current research project looks at the cultural history of Sinophone/Chinese community in the making of Malaya during the Cold War through literature. She is the Mandarin translator of Singapore writer Alfian Sa’at’s short stories collection Malay Sketches.
Ngoi Guat Peng is associate professor at the Sultan Idris Education University, Malaysia (Chinese Program). She received her PhD from the School of Arts and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore. Her research interest includes Chinese intellectual history, Neo-Confucianism and the history and literature of Malaysia and Singapore. She has published a monograph entitled Unity of Jun Dao and Shi Dao: The Discourse of “Unity of Three Teachings” in Late Ming Period in 2016 and a collection of essays called Malaysian Chinese Literary Criticism in 2019.
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Foreword/ Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Foreword/ Syed Husin Ali
Introduction/ Show Ying Xin
Towards “Malaya as method”: Revisiting Nusantara thoughts through Malaya
Part 1: Envisioning Malaya
Chapter 1/ Abdul Rahman Embong
Revisiting Malaya: Envisioning the nation, the history of ideas and the idea of history
Chapter 2/ Hong Lysa
Revisiting Malaya: Malayan dream or Singaporean nightmare?
Chapter 3/ Thum Ping Tjin
The Malayan vision of Lim Chin Siong: Unity, non-violence and popular sovereignty
Chapter 4/ Khor Teik Huat
Malaya’s constitution-making process and ethnic entanglement
Part 2: Malaya in art and literature
Chapter 5/ Lai Chee Kien
Malaya in art and architecture
Chapter 6/ Quah Sy Ren
Imagining Malaya, practising multiculturalism:The Malayan consciousness of Singaporean Chinese intellectuals in the 1950s
Chapter 7/ Wai-Siam Hee
The making of Malaya: On the Malayan Film Unit’s Cold War moving images
Chapter 8/ Teo Lee Ken
Usman Awang: Justice, literature and society
Chapter 9/ Budiawan
Cultural and political relations between Malay(sian) writers and their Indonesian counterparts, 1950–1965
Part 3: Anticolonial struggles and nationalism
Chapter 10/ Mohamed Salleh Lamry
A history of the Tenth Regiment’s struggles
Chapter 11/ Ngoi Guat Peng
The historical discourse on the Malay communists and its limitation
Chapter 12/ Ho Kee Chye
Returning to Malaya: The strategy and significance of the Communist Party of Malaya’s southward advance
Chapter 13/ Ngu Ik-Tien
Ethnicity and nationalism: Ideological struggles in Sarawak after the Second World War
Part 4: Imagined communities in the Malay World
Chapter 14/ Hilmar Farid
The Malay question in Indonesia
Chapter 15/ Sandra Khor Manickam
Wartime imaginings of an archipelagic community: Fajar Asia and the quest for peninsula Malayan and Indonesian unity
Chapter 16/ Rommel A. Curaming
Rizal and the rethinking of the analytics of Malayness
Chapter 17/ Ramon Guillermo
Andres Bonifacio: Proletarian hero of the Philippines and Indonesia
Chapter 18/ Budiawan
How do Indonesians remember Konfrontasi? Indonesia– Malaysia relations and the popular memory of “Confrontation” after the fall of Suharto
Chapter 19/ Farabi Fakih
Malaysia as an “Other” in Indonesian popular discourse
Part 5: The nation-state and beyond
Chapter 20/ Maznah Mohamad
Religion and politics in Malaysian nation-building: A “double-movement” of hegemonic and plural Islam
Chapter 21/ Francis Loh Kok Wah
Ethnic diversity and the nation state in Southeast Asia: From centralisation in the age of nationalism to decentralisation amidst globalisation