The article discusses how the intertextual relationship between film, performing arts, literature, and the liberal capitalist structure of the Malay film studio system was exploited by British colonialists and Malay intellectuals alike to encourage the formation of nationalistic aspirations in the 1950s and 1960s. Although Malay epics were seen to portray a particularly Malay‐centric view of feudal societies, they imply a wider political objective when the production histories of three epic films – the legend of Hang Tuah (1956), his nemesis Hang Jebat (1961), and the folktale Raja Bersiong (1968) – are reviewed. Malaysia's first Prime Minister's incorporation of plays in his political campaigns and forays into film suggests his belief that the media could be instrumental in projecting an indigenised national identity. Created for a wide cinematic audience, such films encouraged cinemas’ function as the space of convergence where members of Malaysia's plural society could participate in the undifferentiated cinematic experience.
With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore explores the purview of imaginative representations of the city. Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and conceptualized space engineered into material form by bureaucrats, experts and commercial interests, a perceptual layer of space is conjured out of people’s everyday life experiences. While such imaginative projections may not be as tangible as its functional designations, they are nonetheless equally vital and palpable. The richness of its inhabitants’ memories, aspirations and meaningful interpretations challenges the reduction of Singapore as a Generic City. Taking the imaginative field as the point of departure, the forms and modes of intellectual and creative articulations of Singapore’s urban condition probe the resilience of cities and the people who reside in them, through the images they convey or evoke as a means for collective expressions of human agency in placemaking.
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