Making Heritage in Malaysia

This book offers a scholarly perspective on heritage as a discourse, concept and lived experience in Malaysia. It argues that heritage is not a received narrative but a construct in the making. Starting with alternative ways of museumising heritage, the book then addresses a broad range of issues involving multicultural and folklore heritage, the small town, nostalgia and the environment, and transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. In so doing it delivers an intervention in received ways of talking about and doing heritage in academic as well as state and public discourse in Malaysia, which are largely dominated by perspectives that do not sufficiently engage with the cultural complexities and sociopolitical implications of heritage. The book also critically explores the politics and dynamics of heritage production in Malaysia to contest Malaysian heritage as a stable narrative, exploring both its cogency and contingency, and builds on a deep engagement with a non-western society in the service of provincialising critical heritage studies, with the broader goal of contributing to Malaysian studies.

Examines how the concept of heritage provides a focal point for young nation-states to claim identity Argues that heritage has become increasingly politicised, and a means to privilege Challenges the idea of heritage as primarily or simply an object or site, and re-theorises heritage as a cultural process that makes and remakes space, environment, landscape, place, memory, gender and identity

Autorentext

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel is Professor of English at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Inhalt

Introduction: Postcolonialising Heritage and the Idea of Malaysia.- PART I: (RE)TELLING MUSEUM AND COMMUNITY STORIES.- Negotiating Museum Narratives: The Sarawak Museum, the Brooke State, and the Construction of Cultural Heritage, 1886-1963.- The Serdang Folk Museum and the Performance of Heritage: Community Museums as an Alternative to National Heritage.- Dual Triumphalist Heritage Narrative and the Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement.- PART II: (RE)MAPPING MULTICULTURAL AND FOLKLORE HERITAGE.- Cultural Mapping and the Making of Heritage.- Re(Con)figuring the Nenek Kebayan through Folktale Adaptation: Malaysian Folktales as Literary and Cultural Heritage.- PART III: THE SMALL TOWN, NOSTALGIA, AND THE ENVIRONMENT.- The Small Town as Heritage in the Writings of Rehman Rashid and Shih-Li Kow.- The unmovable self situated in the quicksand of memory: Nostalgia and Intangible Natural Heritage in the Weather Poems of Shirley Geok-lin Lim.- PART IV: IMAGINED AND COSMOPOLITAN HERITAGE.- Imagined Heritage: Ee Tiang Hong's Eternal Melaka.- Add Place and Stir: Ownership, Authenticity, and the Malaysian Kari Kapitan.- Boria Everywhere in the World: A Penang Burlesque and the Politics of Heritage.