Gaik Cheng Khoo

In the early 1990s, the animist and Hindu traces in adat, or Malay custom, became contentious for resurgent Islam in Malaysia. Reclaiming Adat focuses on the filmmakers, intellectuals, and writers who reclaimed adat to counter the homogenizing aspects of both Islamic discourse and globalization in this period. They practised their project of recuperation with an emphasis on sexuality and a return to archaic forms such as magic and traditional healing. Using close textual readings of literature and film, Khoo Gaik Cheng reveals the tensions between gender, modernity, and nation. Khoo weaves a wealth of cultural theory into a rare analysis of Malay cinema and the work of new Malaysian anglophone writers. Reclaiming Adat makes an essential contribution to our knowledge of the complexities embedded in modern Malaysian culture, politics, and identity. The book will be a useful source for students interested in postcolonial film and literature, Asian culture, and gender studies, as well as the general reader keen to learn about contemporary Malaysia.

Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature

Reclaiming Adat

Thomas Barker

Mary Ainslie

After the end of World War II when many Southeast Asian nations gained national independence, and up until the Asian Financial Crisis, film industries here had distinctive and colourful histories shaped by unique national and domestic conditions. Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998) addresses the similar themes, histories, trends, technologies and sociopolitical events that have moulded the art and industry of film in this region, identifying the unique characteristics that continue to shape cinema, spectatorship and Southeast Asian filmmaking in the present and the future. Bringing together scholars across the region, chapters explore the conditions that have given rise to today's burgeoning Southeast Asian cinemas as well as the gaps that manifest as temporal belatedness and historical disjunctures in the more established regional industries.

From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998)

Southeast Asia on Screen

Jean Duruz

This book analyzes cultures of eating together in Malaysia and Singapore. It explores everyday spaces, such as street stalls, hawker centers, and coffee shops. Reflecting on these as sites for people's “different” culinary exchanges, the book captures resonances of national, ethnic, cosmopolitan and multicultural identity.

Gaik Cheng Khoo

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