Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Malaysian Mosaic: Perspectives from a Poly-Ethnic Society.

Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian. John Postill. New York: Berghahn, 2006. 231 pp.

Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian

Property and politics in Sabah, Malaysia: native struggles over land rights

ABSTRACT This article examines two poetry collections by Omar Musa (b. 1984) and his hyphenated identity as a Malaysian Australian. Extending Jahan Ramazani’s concept of transnational poetics, it draws on Omar’s comments about the importance of the hyphen in his personal and artistic self-fashioning to argue for the presence of a “hyphenational poetics” in his work. This poetics functions as both hyphen and parang (machete), enabling transnational connections and sociopolitical critique. It is evident in the mixture of Malay language and Malaysian cultural details, African American hip-hop rhythms and aesthetics of spoken-word or slam poetry in Musa’s anglophone poems. His poetry performs a simultaneous critique of the sociopolitical status quo of both his ancestral homeland of Malaysia and his country of birth and citizenship, Australia. His hyphenational poetics offers one way of thinking beyond the national–sectional division in Malaysian literature, focusing instead on in-betweenness and cross-cultural borrowings and exchanges.

Hyphenational poetics in Omar Musa’s Parang and Millefiori

Newspaper advertisements for various products have been used to promote the annual rice harvest festival, the Pesta Kaamatan, of the Kadazandusun minority group of Sabah. Robert argued that advertisements in print, as a genre, qualify commodities as embodiments and/or possessions of the nation and that their consumption is a form of appropriation by individuals of the qualities of the nation. This paper asks whether the same notion remains applicable if we replace the nation with one of its allotropes: the ethnic group. While it can be argued that there is a specific Kadazandusun community of consumers, these consumers constitute only a subgroup of the Malaysian whole, albeit one that shares specific characteristics with that whole. This situation reflects the unique form of the Malaysian nation, which presents itself as a pluralistic arrangement in which the main communities retain their cultural distinctiveness. Cultures of consumption and advertisement can be agents in “materializing” and objectifying not only the nation but also the minority ethnic groups that constitute it. Such agency marks the legal, religious and cultural precepts that limit movements between objectified categories, specifically the categories separating Muslims from non-Muslims through different practices of consumption.

Fausto Barlocco

Papers

Consuming Ethnic Identities: "Materializing" the Nation and the Minority in Sabah