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Regionalism versus Bourgeois Nationalism

Oct 04, 2017Comments off

A talk by David Teh from NUS | 27 September 2017

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Arkib Stories #1

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

Al-kesah. The story of boom town 1990s KL would not be complete without the colourful personalities that populated a thriving queer scene. Former nightlife paparazzi Yee I-lann (today a successful photomedia artist) roamed the streets of

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Arkib Stories #2

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

The underlying principle of swaraj (self-rule) that crystallised in India’s independence from the British in 1947 was that of swadeshi, a movement to boycott British goods and support local goods. Along this came the desire for

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Arkib Stories #3

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

The space age gripped the imagination of everyone in Malaya, including the Tamil community. This leaflet from Singapore’s National Library exhibition on theatre history last year promoted Vinvelli Veeran (The Man from Outer Space), a tamil

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Arkib Stories #4

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

Hungry ghost month is upon us. In many parts of town, especially areas with a predominantly Chinese population, one finds burnt offerings by the side of the road or a makeshift stage set up where the

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Arkib Stories #5

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

Photographs are strange things. They speak to you on two registers, as Roland Barthes is wont to say in Camera Lucida (1980). Firstly, the studium. This is when the image communicates knowledge or information. The viewer

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Arkib Stories #6

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

There is a bit of a frontier edge to Tuaran, Sabah. Snooker parlours continue to be a meeting point for many men in the small town. These are in essence, a bustling working class homosocial space,

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Arkib Stories #7

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

Sometimes the provenance of museum collections may yield interesting stories if we’re a bit more imaginative in our historical thinking rather than be boxed in by heritage studies or national history. Take this 19th-century keris from

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Arkib Stories #8

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

Kelantanese culture was in many ways a closer reflection of Pattani customary forms and owed a great deal of its cultural expressions to century-long interactions with the Siamese Hindu-Buddhist mandala polity than say the rest of

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Arkib Stories #9

Aug 31, 2017Comments off

These are Marshall Islands stick charts and they were made using the midrib of coconut fronds. The Marshall Islands are located in the Pacific Ocean within a region of islands known as Micronesia. Historically, the Malayo-Polynesian