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Other Malays
Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World
by Joel S. Kahn, La Trobe University
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A simulating new reading of constructions of ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore.
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Important contribution to understanding the powerful
linkages between ethnicity, religious reform, identity and nationalism in multi-ethnic Southeast Asia.
[T]he questions Kahn asks are the important ones, and the material is drawn together in quite new ways.’
(Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh)
The narrative of Malay identity devised by Malay nationals, writers and filmmakers in the late colonial period associated Malayness with the village or kampung, envisaged as static, ethnically homogenous, rural, etc.
Joel Kahn challenges the kampung version of Malayness, arguing that it ignores the immigration of Malays from outside the peninsula to participate in trade and commercial agriculture, the substantial Malay population in towns and cities, and the reformist Muslims who argued for a common bond in Islam.
Owing to a rising dissatisfaction with the established order and new modernist sensitivies, especially among the younger generation, the author argues that it is time to revisit the alternative, more cosmopolitan narrative of
Malayness.
Published by NIAS Press, ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series
Published 2006, 228 pp., maps
ISBN 978 87 7694 007 2, paperback, £14.99
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