Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature.

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

In the 1990s, Malaysian literature and film enjoyed a resurgence. While some of these artifacts repeated the values of mainstream Islamic culture, more interesting, according to Khoo Gaik Cheng, was a new stream of art that embraced, and sought to reformulate, pre-Islamic custom. By analyzing some of these works, Khoo argues “that modernity facilitates the conscious and unconscious recuperation of adat,” and he assesses how this recuperation is “part of a larger epistemological framework.” Adat is Malay for “custom,” and it has become a catch-all phrase for non- and pre-Islamic practices. Ironically, however, adat is itself an Arabic (and hence, in Malaysia at least, a Moslem) word, and any effort to establish it as the emblem of counterculture must be aware of this paradox. But Khoo is not, and this is not the only blind spot.

The intent of the book is to uncover a burgeoning new “Malay identity and culture,” but often the literature discussed is written by Malaysians in English. Khoo is a self-professed post-colonialist, yet he does not address the obvious contradiction of a new literature that describes a reclaimed native identity in a language of an oppressor. Again the lack of nuance undermines the project.

The text is also frequently alienating in expression and development. The writing is full of the opaque lingo of its theories, and the grammar is sometimes awkward. The audience for the text is also narrow. In its treatment of postmodern theories, the book is academic. It is also aimed at people familiar with Malaysian language and history, since it does not always fully contextualize or elucidate its arguments. For example, Khoo references a distinction between “bangsa Melayu” and “bangsa Malaysia.” He explains “bangsa” (race and nationality) but not the difference between “Melayu” and “Malaysia.” Since this is the word that alters between the two phrases, presumably the point he is making is located therein.

There are interesting insights and arguments in this text, most notably in the discussion of film, but the flaws are numerous and consistent. It’s difficult to recommend to anyone except a sophisticated academic well versed in Malaysian culture.