Revisiting Malaya: Uncovering Historical and Political Thoughts in Nusantara

Editor: Show Ying Xin & Ngoi Guat Peng

Publisher: SIRD

ISBN: 9789672165774

Weight: 0.400 kg

Year: 2020

Page: 532 pp

Price : RM70

"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.

CONTENTS

Foreword 1 / Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Foreword 2 / Syed Husin Ali

Introduction/ Show Ying Xin / Towards “Malaya as method”: Revisiting Nusantara thoughts through 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

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

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

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

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: From centralisation in the age of nationalism to decentralisation amidst globalisation