Rajendran, Charlene

The politics of difference in a multicultural society such as Malaysia is an area of increasing interest in an environment of global anxieties about the "clash of civilisations" (Huntington) and the "flows of culture" (Appadurai). As the lines of race, religion, language and gender become more prescribed by the "authorities" of state and media, they are also diversely contested by those who do not fit or who choose to resist these narrow defines and limiting dictates. Krishen Jit, doyen of Malaysian theatre, dealt with issues of difference and sameness in his multiple staging of Malaysian identities. His theatre process and practice were in several ways critical interventions into the Malaysian cultural landscape. This article will examine some of the strategies used in Krishen Jit's theatre that dealt with cultural difference and emerged as a valuable response to the tensions of identity in Malaysia. It interrogates his choices for theatre and how they indicate a conscious engagement with issues of plural identities within a multicultural mosaic. It seeks to offer a perspective on how the theatre provides an apt site for questions of agency and belonging that arise in negotiating issues of exclusion and inclusion within a plural socio-cultural space.

This article considers the value of growing up stories among theatre practitioners in Singapore as a resource for learning theatre in multicultural contexts. It engages with the lived experiences of five Singapore theatre practitioners, Alfian Sa’at, Alvin Tan, Haresh Sharma, Kok Heng Leun and Ong Keng Sen, whose contributions to discourses on multiplicity and performance are significant in the city–state and internationally. Concepts of ‘Open Culture’ (Kuo. 1998. “Contemplating an Open Culture: Transcending Multiracialism.” In Singapore: Re-Engineering Success, edited by Arun Mahiznan, and Lee Tsao Yuan, 55–60. Singapore: Oxford University Press), ‘postcolonial conviviality’ (Gilroy. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press) and ‘critical multiculturalism’ (Goh. 2009. “Conclusion: Toward a Critical Multiculturalism.” In Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, edited by Daniel P.S. Goh, 213–218. London: Routledge) are proposed as useful frames for understanding theatre in multicultural contexts, and from which the idea of a ‘bricoleur imagination’ is derived.

Southeast Asia’s location as a crossroads between East Asia and South Asia, marks it as a region deeply entrenched in difference. Its history marks it as a region that is highly complex, where apart from indigenous cultures that have survived the tides of change, there are several deeply embedded influences from East Asia and South Asia, the West and elsewhere that have become integral aspects of what is local (Reid, 2015). Education that seeks to deepen an understanding of this history and recognize its value as a resource for regional coherence and cooperation must then negotiate the borderlines of culture that have contributed to how Southeast Asian nations apprehend themselves, and in relation to each other. In this article I propose a critical approach to ‘regionalist’ education in Southeast Asia by engaging with issues of culture in teaching and learning contemporary theatre. I deploy Henry Giroux’s border pedagogy as a working frame to grapple with difference in Southeast Asia, with particular reference to his view that borders are expressions of power that need to be interrogated through pedagogies of difference. I then describe and analyse how the learning process and assessment tasks created for an undergraduate module on Contemporary Theatre in Southeast Asia at a teacher-education institution in Singapore, offer students a space to work with pedagogies of ‘difference’ and ‘discomfort’ and thus reconfigure the boundaries of their identities and communities as potentially local, regional and global.