Reanimating creolization through pop culture: Yasmin Ahmad’s inter-Asian audio-visual integration

Abstract

As one of the most critically celebrated and analysed Malaysian auteurs, Yasmin Ahmad (1959−2009) addressed the complicated postcolonial politics of Malaysia’s multiculturalism in her six feature films. This article examines the relationship between her cinematic imagination of Malaysian multiculturalism and her frequent inter-Asian pop culture referencing. These references initiate on-screen crosscultural dialogues that upend ethnic, gender and class stereotypes. Aestheticizing experiences of partial intelligibility, Yasmin’s audio-visual integration of multilingualism reanimates historical creolization as unanticipated intimacies suppressed by Malaysia’s postcolonial multiculturalism. Questioning popular interpretations of her characters’ relationships as ‘interracial’, this reanimation of creolization does not celebrate the coalescence of an overarching Malaysian or Asian identity (or cinema), but rather proposes more affectionate modes of re-conceptualizing crosscultural relations and initiating neighbourly dialogue.

Filmic Depiction of Malay Subjectivity in the Late Yasmin Ahmad’s Films

“…. made eight total cuts to Sepet ” (Bernards, 2017, p. 61). Muallaf obtained approval “by the censors with three audio mutings” (Bergan, 2009, para.…”

“…Several studies on Yasmin Ahmad and her films have been published after her death, and their style and approach are considered similar to each other. In his “ Reanimating reolization through pop culture: Yasmin Ahmad’s inter-Asian audio-visual integration ,” Bernards (2017) states that “in her lifetime, Yasmin playfully irked Malaysia’s religious conservatives, but, as a devout Muslim, she always did so with a spirit of forgiveness towards her detractors” (p. 56). Khoo (2009) believes that “Yasmin proposes a cosmopolitan version of Islam that crosses ethnic and religious boundaries” (p. 112).…”