Malay/Malaysian/Islamic: four genres of political writings and the postcoloniality of autochthonous texts

Abstract

The hardened and circumscribed reality of being Malay in Malaysia is conditioned upon a historical, constitutional, statistical and normative definition of that identity. This essay explores the articulations of these tensions through the shifting, interchangeable and overlapping notion of Malay/Malaysian/Islamic, which represents the idea of race, citizen and religion. It focuses on four genres of Malaysian political ideas which emanate from the notion of “autochthonous texts”. The four texts consist of the writings of Burhanuddin Al-Helmy, Mahathir Mohamad, Ashaari Muhammad and Dina Zaman. Viewed from the lens of postcoloniality, these texts inform us of the variegated processes of identity construction in four moments of Malaysian history, namely, through experimentations within the liminality of “nation”, through the embrace of the teleology of progress, through the reclamation of space for (ir)rational timelessness and through the rapture of decentredness and hybridity. These writings seek the attention of the Malay as their primary constituency and subject-agent. The authors rhetorically and materially confront the strangeness of their modernity by attempting to orientalize, valorize and reconcile their worldviews. As they do so, the authors and their narrations inscribe, reinforce, replicate and reproduce Malayness as a split identity and Malay politics as the polychromatic expression of pathos and power for self-actualization. In fact it is only within these moments of crisis that culture becomes enlivened and the identity of that elusive Malay can take on its ‘determined’ form.