Islam,state and society in Singapore

Abstract

Muslims are a politically significant religious minority in Singapore. This is compounded by the fact that an overwhelming number of Malays are also Muslims. This conflation of Malay ethnicity and religious identity has led to assumptions of homogeneity when addressing Islam in Singapore. This paper argues for greater care in understanding Muslims in Singapore. It tries to show how the conflation of ethnic and religious identities is a product of historical and political factors. It explores the growing pluralism within Islam as Singaporean Muslims are exposed to processes of modernization, globalization and Islamization. Ultimately, the paper argues that growing heterogeneity is leading to new tensions in the vertical linkages between Islam and the State in Singapore. New contestations for religious authority are producing pressures to de-link ethnic and religious identity in political representation.     

Managing Disagreement while Managing not to Disagree: Polite Disagreement in Negotiation Discourse

This paper explores the exercise of politeness by Malays in business negotiations with Japanese. The study looks at how disagreement is realized linguistically. Its linguistic configurations in the form of speech acts and discourse strategies and their underlying politeness strategies are identified and described. The study also reports on how Malay cultural values are reflected in the language use. The implications of the study for negotiation in general and the expression of disagreement in particular are then discussed. The findings are significant for an understanding of disagreement by Malays, particularly when interacting in English. Additionally it provides insights into how Malay cultural values impinge on Malay interaction styles vis-à-vis styles of disagreement. The findings work towards an understanding of how Malay values are manifested in the discourse of disagreement in oral communication.     

The state question in Chinese popular cultural studies

Abstract

This note is an attempt to trace the change and continuity of leftist political policies, and to analyse why the Left generally, especially the Malay Left, has not been successful in Malaysian politics. It questions why the Malaysian Left was stafter the Second World War but slowly dissipated until it is almost crippled now. Other than examining the formation and the roles of the Malaysian Left and their struggles for independence, this note also sorts out the factors of the unsuccessful struggles to get wide Malay support for the Malay-dominated Malay Nationalist Party of Malaya (PKMM) and the Chinese-dominated Communist Party of Malaya (CPM).     

The filmmaker as activist

ABSTRACT

This study is focused on those filmmakers who make films as a way of fighting to defend human rights. I look in particular in this article at their activist role in the process of documenting human rights abuses in contemporary film projects that explore the aftermath of genocide. In Asia, we can find two examples: the anticommunist genocide in Indonesia in 1965–66 and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975–79. Two contemporary filmmakers have produced works that recover the history of the atrocities: Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh. Traditionally, filmmakers have formed relationships only with victims; however, this article shows how the involvement of the perpetrators is also necessary to fully understand the conflict. This article explores why filmmakers decide to engage with the perpetrators, how they get them to participate, and what the consequences of this process may be. Since Oppenheimer’s involvement with his protagonist, Anwar Congo, in The Act of Killing (2012) turns out especially problematic, exploring this relationship in depth is the central purpose of this article.     

Working and spending in South China: a methodological experiment with visual ethnography

Abstract

Art and architecture played a role in expressions of Malaya's nascent independent state in 1957, but the determination of what Malaya meant, ideologically, was different to different groups. Two types of nationalism were at work, namely that led by ethnic Malay leaders and political parties, and that led by a more ethnically-inclusive set of leaders and groups. This paper explores these concepts as frozen in mural paintings and the accompanying national architecture.     

Cruising Mat Motor: Malay biker masculinity and queer desire in/through KL Menjerit

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of working‐class Mat Motor (Malay biker) masculinity and queer desire in/through KL Menjerit, a commercial biker film that exudes the unmistakably aura of working‐class kejantanan (masculinity). Specifically, I focus on how the film – or more precisely the ‘queer moments’ it contains – resonates in ways that are not necessarily obvious to the disinterested heterosexual public eye. The discussion takes into account both filmic elements and the sexual geography of Kuala Lumpur (KL), where shifting biker spaces sometimes intersect with homosexual cruising sites. My argument is that the film’s representation of the Mat Motor protagonist as unbendingly straight and heterosexually jantan – while imaginably gratifying to the core audience of Mat Motors – actually belies the opposite reality of KL’s ‘forgotten’ underside, where gender and sexuality are much more fluid and malleable than is sanctioned by society and the state.     

Reading the mass violence in Indonesia 1965–1966 as a form of primitive accumulation

Abstract

A human rights perspective is compromised in its ability to understand and respond to the mass violence that took place in Indonesia, largely against members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) from 1965–1966. In “Indonesia's Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965–66,” Hilmar Farid makes the point that a human rights standpoint is limited when capital or its various actors, are involved in propagating and/or perpetrating mass violence. In starting to fashion an alternative reading, Farid proposes Marx's notion of primitive accumulation. While Farid's position is suggestive, I contend that his analysis is marred by a number of theoretical weaknesses, which I attempt to sublate in this article. As such, I will offer an alternative reading of primitive accumulation perceived through a multi-dimensional local/global dialectic.     

The Indonesian Killings and economic redistribution: a reply to Hilmar Farid

Abstract

In 2005 Hilmar Farid published “Indonesia's original sin: Mass killings and capitalist expansion, 1965-66,” the to date only scholarly attempt to interpret the destruction of the Communist Party of Indonesia, which led to the Killings of 500,000 people in the years 1965–1966, according to a classical Marxist framework. His argument is that the real story about the violence is one of massive transfers of agricultural land, which alienated millions of peasants from their means of subsistence and paved the way for a wide-ranging capitalist transformation of the country. Empirical analysis shows that it is unlikely that such a massive alienation has happened. Many other scholars who have studied the Killings conclude that the violence was not solely driven by capitalist expansion. However, Farid has uncovered an important connection between political violence and economic redistribution that should be detached from the Marxist framework he has used in order to unfold its full significance for our understanding of the Killings.     

Doing a literary journal in a divided country: Changbi,its history and projects

Abstract

This paper tells a story about miscegenation between US military personnel and Okinawan women from 1945–1952, which includes sexual violence, the establishment of ‘entertainment districts,’ and the emergence of international marriage. Whereas this history has been mobilized by leftists as a truth‐weapon in the struggle for political sovereignty from the US military, this paper takes an explicitly genealogical approach. Drawing on Foucault's work on biopower, this paper shows how Okinawans were transformed into ‘petitioning subject’ – subjects that negotiated the sexual exploitation of their bodies in tandem with the radically changing relationship between their bodies and the territory.     

Malay(sian)’s image in Indonesian media prior to Konfrontasi era December 1962

This article presents the Malay(sian)’s image in Indonesian media in the early days of the Indonesia–Malaysia conflict at the beginning of 1960s. The dispute started when Tunku Abdul Rahman announced his plan to include Singapore, Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo into the Federation of Malaya. Yet Indonesia regarded it as the British’s neocolonialist project. Left-wing nationalists expressed their opposition to this plan in their daily, Bintang Timur, with illustrations made by Delsy Syamsumar (1935-2001). His artworks may represent how Malaysia was seen by Indonesian artists during the dispute. On the other hand, most of Syamsumar’s artworks demonstrate his sympathy with Azahari, Borneo’s local political leader, who staged the insurgence against the plan on 8 December 1962. This article intends to highlight Syamsumar’s pioneering artworks, picturing the Indonesia–Malaysia dispute published in Bintang Timur in December 1962.     

Han Chinese racism and Malaysian contexts: cosmopolitan racial formations in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

ABSTRACT

This essay explores what it means to theorize Han racism in Malaysian contexts, where ethnic Chinese constitute a minority. Given the history of Malay political dominance and recent intensification of Malay-Muslim ethno-nationalism as part of a backlash against the historic change of government in 2018, theorizing Han racism might seem like a move to downplay these factors and minimize the various forms of racialized violence directed at Chinese identified bodies. To the contrary, I show that doing so involves tracking the transnational process of racial production, which requires understanding how racist and capitalist modes of hierarchy operate in tandem, and how racial discourses are used by the state to manage domestic political exigencies and global economic forces to facilitate ongoing capitalist accumulation. I then turn to consider the arena of world Anglophone literature, which has emerged as a transnational site for narrating Chinese Malaysian experiences, by considering an exemplary text, a 2012 novel by Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists. In examining the material and ideological conditions of the global literary marketplace in shaping the novel, I consider how the cosmopolitan nature of global Anglophone literary production can obscure the racial underpinnings of its cultural productions as in the case of Tan’s novel.     

Religion and politics in Malaysian nation-building: a “double-movement” of hegemonic and plural Islam

This article looks at links and fractures in the development of Political Islam in Malaysia. It looks at the various bases of divides in Malay political mobilization. In the early colonial period, Malay–Islamic political elites were divided along the lines of language and schooling, while the postcolonial era saw the divisions taking on a more ideological basis, marking the deepening of intra-Islamic contestation. The double-movement in Political Islam’s expansion can be seen as moving in two opposite directions. While, on the one hand, the incorporation of Islamic governance in the state had taken on a centralized and hegemonic character, the splintering and pluralization of Political Islam had also occurred in an equally extensive manner.     

Seeing the Communist past through the lens of a CIA consultant: Guy J. Pauker on the Indonesian Communist Party before and after the ‘1965 Affair’

Abstract

This paper explores Guy J. Pauker’s works on Indonesia in the 1960s, particularly the ones concerning the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) before and after the killing of six top Army officers on 30 September 1965 (called the ‘1965 Affair’ for short). Of Western scholars working on Indonesia in 1960s, Pauker was indeed infamous. Being a consultant for the CIA‐sponsored RAND Corporation has made his academic integrity doubtful. In addition, his active roles in several historical events in Indonesia in the 1960s have given his scholarship a bad reputation. Consequently, it is his name, rather than his works, that has often been mentioned and associated with what happened in Indonesia in the 1960s. However, this paper argues that precisely because of such a position, his pre‐‘1965 Affair’ works were to give a cool report and analysis of the current history, through which one can understand better the PKI before it was exterminated due to being accused of masterminding the killing of six top Army officers. Through these works the narrative of the Communist past can ironically be freed from the demonizing image constructed by the New Order regime. Yet, his post‐‘1965 Affair’ works were not only in parallel with, but also a part – if not the core – of the demonization as such. Through his ways of seeing the PKI in 1960s, one can see the shift from Baconian knowledge/power to Foucaultian power/knowledge relations.     

Great Expectations? Childhood,Family, and Middle-Class Social Mobility in Nineteenth-Century England

ABSTRACT

Existing histories of social mobility have focused on adults and on measuring the achievement of individual upward mobility. However, children and families were central to mobility strategies. Using the papers of the Heywoods of Bolton, this article examines how the families of the industrial middle class endowed their offspring with the goods and character needed to secure their social standing, highlighting the emotional intricacy of these processes. It demonstrates that such families conceived of social mobility as a familial project and that rather than pursuing upward mobility, their chief objective was to guard against social decline.     

Ethnicity and nationalism: ideological struggles in Sarawak after the Second World War

This paper studies how ethnicity has influenced the construction of nationalism in two political movements that took place in Sarawak, a former British colony in North Borneo. It analyzes the discourse of colonialism, freedom and independence that revolved around two movements, namely the anti-cession movement and the underground communist movement, controlled respectively by the ethnic Malay and Chinese in Sarawak. A comparison of these two movements is made by looking at the fundamental differences between two movements and the way the British responded to them. In the analysis, local political developments as well as transnational links are taken into consideration as this paper assumes that transnational exposure was instrumental in shaping local nationalism. In doing so, the paper intends to explain the domination of ethnic nationalism in political discourse and institutions of Sarawak.     

Anthropology,Socialist Prediction and William Morris's Commonweal

ABSTRACT

In the late nineteenth century a number of writers turned to anthropology to predict a socialist future. They included prominent revolutionary socialists such as Friedrich Engels, William Morris and members of the Socialist League. Contextualizing the appropriation of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan by such writers, this article also pays particular attention to socialist popularizations of anthropology, particularly those by Morris and his fellow writers in his penny weekly, the Commonweal. Focusing on Morris's articles on ancient society helps to illuminate his own understanding of history, art and socialism. It also sheds new light on his predictive fiction News from Nowhere, which was originally read alongside Commonweal non-fiction. Both, I will argue, encouraged readers to see the future in the struggles of the ancient past.     

Late Colonial Estrangement And Miscegenation

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to reassess the work of two contemporary writers in the 1930s: Gilberto Freyre in Brazil and E. du Perron in the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). Their famous narratives (respectively, Casa-Grande e Senzala and Het Land van Herkomst) present a (post) colonial world where inequality, violence and racism are almost as conspicuous as mixing and contact across the colour lines. In fact, although one work is a sociological and historical interpretation of colonial and imperial Brazil and the other a literary reworking of personal reminiscences related to Indies society in the early twentieth century, both construct worlds that present several important similarities.     

Hot-Heads,Gentlemen and the Liberties of Tradesmen

Abstract

Over the summer and autumn of 1739 Philadelphia’s two newspapers published competing versions of a hearing in the Pennsylvania assembly that was described as the ‘Affair of the Tanners’. What began as a minor property dispute in the colonial assembly became, with the aid of the local press, a citywide paper war for the support of the urban populace. This article argues the affair provides unique evidence for competing conceptions of the common good in the eighteenth-century colonial city, and was an expression of conflict with deep roots in Philadelphia’s history. The affair also shows how the medium of print could reflect both transatlantic cultural processes as well as distinctly local grievances, as a group of prosperous city artisans and their opponents utilized the city’s newspapers to articulate competing commonwealth ideologies.     

The Right to Write in German Colonies of the Early Twentieth Century: Pugnacious Settler Newspapers,Anxious Governors and African Journalism in Exile

ABSTRACT

The entangled history of the German Colonial Press Law (written 1906–1912) begins with the wish of the German East African Governor to keep the pugnacious settler press under control. Under the influence of a racist discourse that sought to restrict education for Africans and feared anti-colonial actions and networks, the law developed into a legal basis that could impede publishing activities of the colonised in all German colonies. In Togoland, African writers bypassed such restrictions by publishing critical articles in the adjacent British Gold Coast Colony and thereby succeeded in entering transnational supportive networks.     

Cinematic citizenship and the illegal city

Abstract

This paper examines some of the questions that could emerge from the relationship between Law and Cinema. While there has been some scholarship on law and cinema, most of it has largely focused on the formal properties of film, and not moved beyond the question of representation. This paper argues that for a fruitful enquiry to emerge, we would need to have an understanding of the complex relationship between the spatial implication of cinema, practices of groups like fan clubs, the question of changing technologies of cinema and how they relate to issues of citizenship and modernity. Finally, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of non‐legal media circulation or piracy in the contemporary and links this to the question of citizenship and globalization.