Contested spaces

Abstract

The arts community in Malaysia has been affected in many ways by the state’s desire to homogenize and essentialize ethnicity internally, whilst displaying pluralist ideals externally. There are two levels to the debate, one which is orientated towards the global, where the state employs a multicultural tourism imagery, whilst the other is a localized debate mainly informed by reactionary conservatism and state institutions. Concurrently, the arts community employs, uses and deploys global institutions and regional activism to counteract, validate or co-opt state mechanisms of control. Art forms such as mak yong have been pulled into a political tussle over ownership and power to demarcate what is or should be Islamic, Malay or Malaysian. As a result, practitioners and activists collide with the state’s apparatus and its agents.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.