* stalling or delaying especially by refusing to answer questions or cooperate
While we're on the topic of re-writing or re-inventing histories, and by extension national and cultural identities, we're often confronted with the fallacy of 'cultural purity', that a certain culture can be 'untainted' by 'corrupting' external influences (The phrase "nilai-nilai murni budaya timur" rings clearly in our collective memories).
Just as historical 'texts' are 'sites of ideological struggles' or 'contested terrains', the meanings and interpretations of cultural 'texts' - 'bling bling', McDonald's, Barney, Top 40s Hit, 'bestselling' fiction and nonfiction, 'blockbuster' movies, etc - that define our everyday 'lived' culture/s and thus cultural identities are also 'sites of contestation'.
So, is Malaysia Truly Asia, mah?
To further delve on the notion of 'cultural hybridity', the following are excerpts from an 'intra-view':
Cinema Interval by Trinh T. Minh-ha*
www.filmref.com/journal/archives/2006/04/cinema_interval_by_trinh_t_min.html
"For me, there is no such thing as pure culture. Whether I deal with Africa or with Vietnam, my own culture, I would have to deal with the very hybridity of the culture itself...Hence, the necessity immediately to question my own position as outsider and as a 'hybrid insider' because, despite the differences, I recognize acutely the ethics and the experiences related to colonialism's aftermath, which I myself grew up with in Vietnam. If it was odd, as an insider, to read about oneself being offered up as a cultural entity by experts writing on Vietnamese culture, it was unsettling to look at oneself and others from the standpoint of an outside-insider in Senegal. The encounter with African cultures thus became a catalyst to think about questions of subjectivity and power relations."
"What is at stake is the problem of established power relationships. When this explanatory language becomes dominant, when it becomes so pervasive that the only way people can think about something is to think about it literally, then for me, that language also becomes dangerous, because its cultural centralization constitutes a form of impoverishment - the ways in which we think are reduced and homogenized - as it excludes or invalidates all other ways of communicating."
"This seems to be the case with a notion like 'hybridity', which has provided a strategic space for a range of new possibilities in identity struggles, but is being reappropriated in diverse milieus, such as the art milieu. Curators can continue to "collect cultures" from remote parts of the world, but rather than retrieving information and salvaging tradition, they now expertly stage and circulate the 'hybrid object'."
"Instead of going back to Kant and Heidegger, why not explore, for example, how Derrida's theories can meet Merce Cunningham's dances, or intersect with certain trends in contemporary performance arts? Why follow only the vertical and its hierarchies when the oblique and the horizontal in their multiplicities are no less relevant and no less fascinating for the quest of truth and knowledge? Why not first and foremost explore how any theory or writing speaks specifically to us - to our situated social and individual selves - from where we are, in our actualities, in our cultural differences, our circumstantial positionings and diversely mediated backgrounds?"
"I feel a great affinity with Marguerite Duras' remark that after the premiere of her film India Song, she had the impression of being dispossessed, not only of a given area, a place, her habitat, but even of her identity...It is through the politics of denationalizing the refugee and the émigré, that a person-who-leaves becomes normalized, being systematically compelled to undergo the process of giving up their home, their country, their language, their proper name. In order to be accepted, one has to abandon one's unwanted self. In order to belong anew, one has to take the oath of loyalty, which entails disloyalty to one's home nation and identity."
* Filmmaker, writer, poet, literary theorist, educator, musical composer, and (un/non)ethnographer, Trinh T. Minh-ha builds much of her work around the theme of the "other" (the persona one considers him/herself to be in relation to), challenging cultural theorists' traditional notions of the subject or/subjected duality. She performed three year's worth of ethnographic field research in West Africa the Research Expedition Program of the University of California, Berkeley. This fieldwork led in part to her first film, Reassemblage, which was filmed in Senegal and released in 1982.
Other Works:
Cinema Interval (1999)
Drawn From African Dwellings (1996)
Framer Framed (1992)
When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1991)
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)
En Miniscules (1987)
African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta (1985) (with Jean-Paul Bourdier)
Un Art Sans Oeuvre (1981)
Films:
A Tale of Love (1996)
Shoot for the Contents (1991)
Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989)
Naked Spaces: Living Is Round (1985)
Surname Viet, Given Name Nam
PLOT DESCRIPTION
This documentary explores the lives of five women who have survived the Vietnam conflict to live in current (1989) Vietnam. It also underscores the inferior place of women in Vietnamese society both before and after the war, but nonetheless elicits the strong bond each woman feels for her country and society. The lives of all these women are structured by traditional views like the "four virtues" and the "three submissions." Vietnamese women's lives traditionally have three stages: before marriage, she must be a lady; during marriage, she is like a maid; after marriage, she is like a monkey. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
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