Making Heritage in Malaysia

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel is Professor of English at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 

Introduction: Postcolonialising Heritage and the Idea of “Malaysia”.- PART I: (RE)TELLING MUSEUM AND COMMUNITY STORIES.- Negotiating Museum Narratives: The Sarawak Museum, the Brooke State, and the Construction of Cultural Heritage, 1886-1963.- The Serdang Folk Museum and the Performance of Heritage: Community Museums as an Alternative to National Heritage.- Dual Triumphalist Heritage Narrative and the Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement.- PART II: (RE)MAPPING MULTICULTURAL AND FOLKLORE HERITAGE.- Cultural Mapping and the Making of Heritage.- Re(Con)figuring the Nenek Kebayan through Folktale Adaptation: Malaysian Folktales as Literary and Cultural Heritage.- PART III: THE SMALL TOWN, NOSTALGIA, AND THE ENVIRONMENT.- The Small Town as Heritage in the Writings of Rehman Rashid and Shih-Li Kow.- “The unmovable self situated in the quicksand of memory”: Nostalgia and Intangible Natural Heritage in the Weather Poems of Shirley Geok-lin Lim.- PART IV:  IMAGINED AND COSMOPOLITAN HERITAGE.- Imagined Heritage: Ee Tiang Hong’s “Eternal” Melaka.- “Add Place and Stir”: Ownership, Authenticity, and the “Malaysian” Kari Kapitan.- “Boria Everywhere in the World”: A Penang Burlesque and the Politics of Heritage.

“An invaluable collection of scholarly inquiries into the discourses, politics, and tensions of heritage-making in contemporary Malaysia. … Authored by specialists in literary studies, cultural studies, and history, the eleven chapters in this collection not only ‘provincialise’ critical heritage studies by deploying case studies and perspectives from and of Malaysia, but also direct our attention to the constructed, and contested, nature of race, culture, nation — and heritage.” (Loo Hong Chuang, SARE, Southeast Asian Review of English, Vol. 58 (1), 2021)