This book provides an overview of an area which has, until now, been relatively neglected: museums and public history in Malaysia. Through a survey of a number of the institutions that have sprung up as part of a postcolonial museumising boom, Abu Talib Ahmad analyses the extent to which their exhibits support or challenge national historical narratives. His consideration of the impact of political and cultural developments from the 1960s to the present offers a revealing perspective on contemporary Malaysian attitudes towards history and heritage.
The National Museum in Kuala Lumpur forms the starting point for the study. Since 2007, this institution has focused solely on history, incorporating many of the exhibits formerly displayed in the now-defunct National History Museum. The book's extended introduction describes both museums’ foregrounding of nationalist, Malay-centric narratives which are designed to complement the national history curriculum and to support official nation-building aims. The author then introduces the numerous provincial and thematic museums on which the rest of the book focuses, and outlines the study's central goal: to examine the ‘contests and challenges between and within museums’ across peninsular Malaysia, comparing the narratives represented in a range of provincial and memorial museums with those in the national museum, and with one another (p. 40).
The book's chapters are ordered thematically, each discussing the representation of a particularly contested aspect of Malaysian history in a range of museums, and assessing the influence of competing political pressures. The contested topics covered include the pre-Islamic history of the region, including indigenous and Hindu–Buddhist cultural influences; the arrival and spread of Islam within Malaysia; the Melaka Sultanate and its significance for Malay identity; the Japanese Occupation; the memorialising of prominent individuals from politics and popular culture; and, the representation of cultural heritage and the monarchy in the post-independence period. These discussions are supported with detailed descriptions of the exhibitions in question and their development over time.
Throughout Museums, history and culture in Malaysia, a number of key issues recur. The influence of political agendas — both central and provincial — on museum narratives is clearly drawn out. In the chapter dealing with the Japanese Occupation, for example, the author contrasts the ‘official’ narrative of the war years, which emphasises the positive consequences of the Occupation for Malaysia's journey to independence and minimises Japanese responsibility for local suffering, with the more diverse local experiences that are foregrounded in the war museums in Kota Bharu and Penang.
Another recurring theme is the role of museums in defining the nature of ‘Malayness’, and the extent to which exhibits reflect the political and cultural dominance of the Malays. As such, the book's analysis of the impact of the National Cultural Policy, particularly in the final chapter, is extremely insightful. It reveals the continuing struggles over the acknowledgement of non-Islamic influences on Malay culture past and present, in the face of Islamic resurgence and efforts towards cultural ‘purification’. In the process, Abu Talib elucidates the deleterious effects of these debates on the preservation of local heritage. Meanwhile, the marginalisation of other ethnic groups in provincial museums is examined at length, as well as the ongoing inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic battles to allow all voices to be heard within public history and heritage narratives. The author argues that these trends have perpetuated a negative perception of museums among non-Malay communities who feel their experiences are inadequately represented, rendering futile many nation-building efforts.
While Abu Talib Ahmad does not dwell on the broader theoretical contexts in which his discussion is situated, he engages extensively with recent scholarship in Malaysian history and archaeology. In doing so, he highlights the many areas in which this diverges from museum narratives. This approach is at its most effective in Chapter 4, which analyses the representation of prime ministers Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Abdul Razak in their respective memorials. The author examines historiographical debates about these leaders’ political contributions, before going on to show how the memorial exhibitions carefully sidestep these discussions, and instead choose to emphasise the politicians’ admirable — and less contestable — personal qualities of determination, meticulousness and loyalty to the nation. In his conclusion, he returns to this theme to express concern about museum boards’ lack of receptiveness to contemporary scholarship, and the potential consequences of this for museum development.
As a whole, Museums, history and culture in Malaysia provides in-depth insight into the museum sector in Malaysia, its role in nation-building and identity formation, as well as the pressures it faces from central and local government, and from increasingly vocal elements in Malaysian society. The book's conclusions are therefore of importance to museum studies and to the growing discourse on public history and heritage in contemporary Southeast Asia.
