Full Description
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.
Contents
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.
