'New Bumiputeraism' as pegagogy of hope and liberation

The ‘New Bumiputeraism’ as Pedagogy of Hope and Liberation:

Teaching the Alternative Malaysian Ethnic Studies

Azly Rahman

Introduction

Malaysia is facing a new dilemma of governance. The country has entered into a more complex form of contradiction in the area of race relations. Increasingly the situation is seen in this way. The Malays are still indoctrinated by the idea that the Chinese control the economy. The Chinese are persuaded by the perception that the Malays must still be represented by leaders who know how to play the ‘race card’. The Indians are still left on their own to suffer. The Iban and the Kadazandusuns are left out of the national debate. We have the dilemma of the growing population of immigrants whose sense of Malaysian nationalism needs to be cultivated. The Malays continue to be misrepresented by yet another generation of leaders who believe that ‘race’ is still the root cause of social injustices. Despite this pessimistic prognosis, growing numbers of progressive Malays are more critically aware of the racial power play designed and taken advantage of by the regime in power. The media and the control of wealth and resources by a few Malaysians and their friends and families have made possible the sustenance of the race-based ideology. The Malays are made to believe that their survival must continue to lie in accepting that there is a bogeyman – that is other races, namely the Chinese, who allegedly continue to control the economy. The longer the Malays of the lowest economic status continue to be held in mental and economic bondage, the longer the structure of dependence (and hence structural violence and oppression) will continue to be institutionalised.

The political and social landscape after the 8 March 2008 elections demands a fresh and serious re-examination of multiculturalism. It is against the backdrop of these contradictions that I discuss ways in which educators can approach multiethnic education. In doing so, I draw on the lessons from postcolonialism as a project that seeks to change the way people think in order to produce more just and equitable social relations (Young, 2003). The discussion is organised in four main sections. In the first part, I provide an overview of postcolonialism as theory, politics and practice. This is done since the promise of postcolonialism is to offer a ‘radical rethinking of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and western domination’ (Prakash, 1994: 1475; see also Mulenga, 2009). Here some of the key foundational thinkers of postcolonialism are examined critically. Second, I examine that enduring legacy of nationalism in modern Malaysian history and suggest that the way it has been used has created a kind of ‘postindustrial tribalism’ which is the enemy of genuine multiculturalism. Third, having highlighted the deficiencies in the official discourse on ‘national identity’ I propose the idea of a ‘new Bumiputeraism’ as a way of instituting a more inclusive national project. This then opens up the debate in the final part which demonstrates how new cultural practices and policy imperatives in education are linked to colonial and postcolonial formations. The analysis calls explicitly for a paradigm shift in thinking. In doing so, I suggest a new curricular approach for educationalists that may effect such a shift.

Postcolonialism: Some Theoretical Considerations

We begin with a critical examination of postcolonial theory to assess its relevance in asking why so many curriculum practices are still so far away from fulfilling the goals of a genuine multicultural education. This is best done through a review of the work on critical postcolonial theory.

In our effort to make sense of the multiplicity of perspectives leading to the formulation of an educational paradigm based upon multicultural and postcolonial sensibilities, we are faced with the dilemma of choice. Put simply, postcolonialism is located in a ‘highly contested political and theoretical terrain’ (Rizvi et al., 2006: 249). Even the term ‘postcolonial’ itself has been a recurring topic of discussion with considerable debate over how the meaning of ‘post’ is connected to ‘colonial’. From our perspective, the ‘post’ in postcolonial is used to demonstrate how the ‘colonial condition’ has not yet passed. Rather it signifies various ways that the historical context of colonialism is intimately connected to contemporary neocolonial conditions (Hall, 1996; Subedi and Daza, 2008). The starting point for understanding the impact of postcolonialism is its claim to make visible the history and legacy of European colonialism. This is not simply an historical condition that belongs to the past. Postcolonialism draws attention to the ways that most contemporary discourses and institutions in the ‘developing world’ are politically, culturally and economically shaped by that colonial legacy. As Homi Bhabha (1994: 6) observes, the postcolonial ‘is a salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’ relations within the new world and the multinational division of labour’. In that sense, then, Malaysia is an exemplary neocolonial society which can be well understood through the lenses of postcolonial theory and praxis.

The development of the field of postcolonial studies can be traced to debates that range across various disciplines and movements. In fact, given its contested character, it is perhaps best thought of as a set of debates rather than a singular, coherent theory. These debates have sought to question and criticise colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism from disciplines as wide-ranging as literature, sociology, history, anthropology, geography and, indeed, education studies.

There have been a number of foundational inspirations for postcolonial studies and here we highlight four key contributions, those of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Syed Hussein Alatas and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Writing in the 1960s, Fanon was especially concerned with what he calls the ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’. According to Fanon, independence from colonialism did not mean liberation. In particular, nationalism often fails to achieve liberation across class boundaries because its aspirations are primarily those of the colonised bourgeoisie – a privileged middle class who seeks to defeat the prevailing colonial rule only to usurp its place with its own forms of domination, surveillance and coercion. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon famously blames the failings of nationalism on the ‘intellectual laziness of the middle class’ (1963: 149). And in another passage which tells the story of so many national struggles for independence he captures the way in which people are betrayed:

Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty, and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches bread, land, and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie (Ibid.: 166).

The significance of these insights lies in Fanon’s problematising of the binary opposition of coloniser and colonised. Instead, he emphasises that both colonialism and the postcolonial order can only be understood as ‘a complicated network of complicities and internal power imbalances between groups within the broader categories of colonizer and colonized’ (Rizvi et al., 2006: 251). In other words, Fanon challenges the fixed notion of settled identities and cultural definition. These are constantly in flux in a dynamic process of construction and reconstruction. Postcolonial studies thus inspired by Fanon provide a way of understanding the ongoing effects of colonialism through the agency of the national bourgeoisie. In that regard, his significance for the Malaysian case cannot be overstated. A postcolonial approach influenced by Fanon would question the fixity of identities that has underpinned the entire political settlement since before independence and been enshrined in the constitution. It would, at the same time, point to the role of the Malay(sian) nationalist class who are caught up in a contradictory bind – of wanting deliverance from colonial oppression but who actually end up using the same vocabulary and instruments of domination and coercion (see Gibson, 2003).

Though Fanon is an important voice in offering a profound critique of the postcolonial condition, there is little doubt that the field of postcolonial studies owes a great deal to Said’s (1978) Orientalism, often considered the founding text of the field (Subedi and Daza, 2008: 2). Said offers a critique of orientalism as a field of study that he believes to be deeply political in the manner in which that knowledge about the orient has been produced. It is particularly knowledge produced from the literary and humanistic traditions that has shaped the existence of the orient or how the occident or the West had wanted it to be. Said (1978: 20) believes that misrepresentations of the orient are derived from the ideology and perception of authors attempting to describe it from their ‘strategic location’ which then produces discourses that are ideologically dominating. He argues that the Western representation of the other as exotic, deviant and different was intimately bound up with the reality of ‘dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Ibid.: 3). In order to demystify this representation of canonical knowledge, Said (Ibid.: 24, 27) suggests methodologies which would not only analyse the politics of knowledge production but also looks at orientalism from the vantage point of ‘libertarian … non-repressive and non-manipulative, perspective’ via transcultural studies. As we shall see, this has important implications for the role of education in general, and of curricula in particular.

One very important link between Fanon and Said’s work is provided by Syed Hussein Alatas’s seminal text The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) which was praised by the latter as ‘startlingly original’. Like Said, Alatas precedes other postcolonial scholars in questioning the discourse of orientalism and its representation of the ‘native’. He also challenges the assumption of objectivity within Western scholarship, a notion that has become all but accepted in the social sciences. And like Fanon, he suggests that colonialism was not simply a political or economic phenomenon but also functioned psychologically and discursively. Specifically, Alatas maps out the dominant position of the West in hierarchies of knowledge and the assumption of its epistemological superiority and utility. Of particular relevance here is Alatas’s notion of the ‘captive mind’ that remains trapped within colonial categories. He suggests that ‘this ‘captivity’ was not an intentional imposition or appropriation but rather a pervasive ‘unconscious(ness) of its own captivity and the conditioning factors making it what it is’’ (Sevea, 2007). Alatas’s involvement in and reflections upon Malaysian politics creates the most obvious direct link between the foundational insights of postcolonial theory and the realities of developing societies. He points out the irony of nationalist politicians uncritically adopting ‘Western’ economic systems, governance, law, ideas of democracy, electoral procedures and conceptions of welfare. The result was corruption and underdevelopment embedded in a fundamentally neocolonial system. At the same time, he was a coruscating critic of Mahathir Mohamed and UMNO’s neocolonial linkage of Malay economic backwardness to ‘the myth of the lazy native’. In direct echoes of Fanon, Alatas charges the nationalist ruling elite with ‘psychological feudalism’ and suggests that the so-called Malay indigenous vision – enshrined in Bumiputeraism – was ironically more biased than the earlier British one (Alatas, 1968; see Cheah, 1994). In light of this critique, Alatas’s work can be understood as a search for an indigenous social science tradition to free the ‘captive mind’ and was a highly significant, though undervalued, early intervention into debates that refashioned the social sciences to accommodate diverse civilisational and cultural expressions.

While both Said and Alatas believe in an epistemological focus of what postcolonial studies can be, it is Spivak, in The Post-colonial Critic (1990a) and elsewhere, who advocates the teaching of transnational cultural studies in the area of English language teaching (Spivak, 1990b, 1993). Spivak, who primarily analyses the case of the teaching of English in the American classroom, calls for the reclaiming and conceptualising of the true meaning of the word ‘we the people’. The primary shift in methodology, she claims, must be one which would celebrate subaltern voices rather than let narratives based upon Western foundations dominate. Spivak suggests this new paradigm, transnational cultural studies, be based upon deconstructionism, feminism and Marxism as tenets in order for the issues of presumed neutrality, knowledge-constituted interests and politics of knowledge production and dissemination to be adequately addressed. This shift in paradigm is necessary according to Spivak if we are to envision the ‘development of a cosmopolitanism that is global, gendered, and dynamic’ (1990b: 292).

The four authors we have highlighted write from their particular ethnological perspective. Fanon and Alatas were deeply concerned with how postcolonial subjects can achieve decolonisation and liberation from the psychosis of desires and the ‘captive mind’. Said questions the Eurocentric paradigm while Spivak proposes a multivocalic point of view. Fanon’s insights derive from a stinging critique of the shortcomings of a national consciousness especially in the hands of the postcolonial bourgeoisie. In doing so he suggests an important insight into the dialectical relationship between the coloniser and colonised, between the elite and the marginalised. This is taken up in Alatas’s indictment of the neocolonial bourgeoisie which is deeply implicated in the continuation of ‘psychological feudalism’. Said’s work, for its part, largely rests upon a critique of ideology in knowledge production by looking at orientalism from an epistemological vantage point while Spivak bases hers on a methodological platform which calls upon the curricular approach to be shifted from modernist to a postmodernist perspective. The common strand in all the four approaches is that they actively challenge elite, dominant accounts of history, both of colonialism and nationalism, by promoting the voices of the ‘subaltern’. In this regard, the discursive and cultural practices of domination are at least as important as the economics of domination, and play an equally vital role in the production and maintenance of unequal social relations. This approach thus questions the claim that knowledge is value-neutral and asserts that human agents are involved in its production, situated largely within their historical and political context. Postcolonial studies must then be approached from a perspective which first subverts the apolitical claims to knowledge and next seeks to design pedagogical strategies taking into consideration subaltern and marginalised voices which see human beings as makers of history and masters of their own destiny.

What, then, can these insights from key postcolonial thinkers offer for our understanding of education? Postcolonialism’s contentions about the relationship between knowledge and power are directly linked to education, understood both as an institutional form where people imbibe the dominant systems of thinking and reasoning as well as a site where dominant ideas and practices can be resisted. In other words, postcolonialism crosses a highly ambivalent terrain. On the one hand, postcolonialism offers a thorough critique of the way that educational discourses and practices are deeply complicit in the reproduction of inequality, injustice and relations of domination and coercion. On the other hand, it is only through education that it is possible to both reveal and resist the continuing hold of hegemonic ideas on people’s assumptions and imagination (Rizvi et al., 2006: 256ff.). It is precisely this ambiguity that has shaped debates in Malaysia over questions of the ‘nation’, belonging and identity. In doing so, the dominant ideology of Bumiputeraism has framed an entire national discourse for more than a generation. At the same time, postcolonialism suggests ways for the supersession of this ideology and its replacement with something else altogether, what I call the ‘new Bumiputeraism’. In my view, this will help prepare the minds of our generation and our children’s to think creatively, critically, and futuristically. Subaltern modes of thinking can then perhaps mean those which can build moral foundations not out of our ideological fights over crumbs but of building what is peaceably possible. This must be the basis of Malaysia’s approach to multicultural studies. In the following section, I will link the insights of postcolonial studies to the practice of the discipline of multiculturalism.

Nationalism and Tribalism

A starting point for the possibilities of ‘postcolonial praxis in education’ lies in a fundamental reconceptualisation of the kind of ‘nationalism’ and ‘tribalism’ that have coloured not only Malaysian politics but also education and political socialisation (Subedi and Daza, 2008). It is here that Fanon’s insights – written more than half a century ago precisely at the time of Malaysia’s independence struggle – are pertinent. As we have seen, ‘national identity’, while vital to the emergence of a coherent anticolonial movement in the 1940s and 1950s, paradoxically limits such efforts at liberation. By the time of the inscribing of the federal constitution and in the cultural practices that came to dominate political discourse over the following decades, the elite understanding of ‘national identity’ did little more than reinscribe an essentialist, totalising, and fetishised understanding of ‘nation’ and its constituent ‘tribes’ – a return to what Alatas calls ‘psychological feudalism’ In doing so, it forbade the emergence of a nuanced articulation of an oppressed people’s cultural heterogeneity across class and ethnic lines. In other words, the concept of ‘nation’ – with its promise of solidarity and unity – has proven nothing more than a mirage in creating genuine political amelioration from the legacies of colonialism.

This kind of fetishised, tribally-based national identity lives on more than fifty years later. Far from the aspirations for unity, strength and humanity, what has become commonplace is fragmentation, weakness and social violence. An example here illustrates the nature of public statements made vis-à-vis particularly Malay nationalism and tribalism. An UMNO Perlis delegate Hashim Suboh was quoted in a New Straits Times report as saying at the end of the debate on economy and education issues that ‘Datuk Hisham (then UMNO Youth chief Hishammuddin Hussein) has unsheathed his keris, waved his keris, kissed his keris. We want to ask Datuk Hisham when he is going to use it’. The Perlis delegate made the remark while saying ‘force must be used against those who refused to abide by the social contract’ in relation to Hishammuddin’s alleged weakness in dealing with demands from the Chinese schools (Malaysiakini, 18 November 2006). That delegate’s remark is an embarrassment to the peace-loving people of Perlis and does not represent Malay cultural inclinations. The Malays of Perlis elect their representative not to misrepresent them with a false image of myopia and paranoia, or amuk and latah. It shows how ill-prepared he is in dealing with sensitive issues. It is telling the people of Perlis that they need better leaders with better command of the vocabulary of peace and better understanding of what the ‘social contract’ means.

Given these ‘pitfalls’ of national and tribal consciousness, a number of pertinent questions arise: What is a Malay? What is a Malaysian? What is a nationalist? What is a ‘nation’? How are we becoming ‘re-tribalised’ in this world of increasing restlessness over a range of issues that are not being resolved by the current regime? These are burning questions as we become more mature in discussing race relations in Malaysia – more than 40 years after the 13 May 1969 incident. Students of nationalism would agree that UMNO does not have an ideology except to sustain its elusive political superiority via the reproduction of the marginalised forever in thrall to their power and coercion.

Even the words ‘Barisan Nasional’ (National Front) are elusive. The coalition is surviving as a means to cling on to power – by all means necessary. Its survival lies in the way people are divided, conquered and mutated into ‘postindustrial tribes’; market-segmented, differentiated and sophisticated enclaves that are produced out of the need of the free market economy to transform Malays and Malaysians into consumers of useless goods and ideology. Postindustrial tribalism is a natural social reproduction of the power of the media to shape consciousness and to create newer forms of consumerist human beings. Nationalism, including Malay nationalism of the Mahathir and post-Mahathir eras, is an artificial construct that needs the power of ‘othering’ and ‘production of enemies’ and ‘bogeymen and bogeywomen’ for ideological sustainability.

But what is ‘nationalism’ and does ‘Malay nationalism’ actually exist in this century? Does the idea of the ‘nation’ or a ‘people’ survive merely on the basis of linguistic, territorial and religious homogeneity when these are also subject to the sociological interrogations of subjectivity and relativity? Nationalism is a psychological and cultural construct useful and effective when deployed under certain economic conditions. It is now ineffective as a tool of mass mobilisation when nations have gained ‘independence’ from the colonisers and when the ‘enemy’ is no longer visible. All that exists in this postindustrial, globalised, borderless and mediated age of cybernetic capitalism is the idea of ‘postindustrial tribes’ that live and thrive on chaos and complexity and on materials and goods produced by local and international capitalists.

The non-Malays and non-Bumiputera have come a long way into being accepted as fully-fledged Malaysians, by virtue of the ethics, rights and responsibilities of citizenship – and by resisting the fetished, essentialised version of national consciousness that was fostered for so long. In any ‘normal’ society they ought to be given equal opportunity in the name of social justice, racial tolerance and the alleviation of poverty. Bright and hard-working Malaysians regardless of racial origin who now call themselves Malaysians must be given all the opportunities that have been given to Malays for the past 40 years. Islam and other religions require this form of social justice be applied to the lives of human beings. Islam does not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour, creed or national origin. It is race-based politics, borne out of the elusiveness of nationalism, that creates postindustrial tribalistic leaders; leaders that will design postindustrial tribalistic policies. It is the philosophy of greed, facilitated by free enterprise run amok that will force leaders of each race to threaten each other over the control of the economic pie. The claim of ‘civilisational Islam’ or Islam Hadhari must be backed with a philosophy of development that restructures society not on the basis of newer forms of postindustrial tribalism that accords the political elites with the best opportunity to amass more wealth, but on a redesigned economy based on an efficient and sound socialistic economic system. It will require political will to curb human enthusiasm for acquiring more and more of the things they do not need. In short, the new philosophy should curb the temptation to out-consume each other in the name of greed.

To be civilised means to wake up to the possibilities of humanism and not plunge into a world of more sophisticated racism. The universal principle of humanism requires the privileged few to re-examine the policies of national development that prioritise the creation of projects for the wealthy rather than the construction of programmes that meet the basic needs of all races and classes of peoples. To civilise a nation means to detribalise the citizens into a polity that will learn to share the wealth of this nation by accepting this land as the ‘earth of mankind’ (bumi manusia) rather that as a land belonging to this or that race. In a multiracial, multireligious country such as Malaysia, nationalism is a complex yet withering concept. In a globalised world of globally- and government-linked companies this concept of ‘fatherland’ or ‘motherland’ is a powerful weapon of the wealthy to mount arguments that hide the real intention of empire-building. The lifestyle of the country’s rich and famous require nationalist sentiments to be played up so that the more the rights are ‘protected’ the more the political and economically rich few will have their sustained control over the people, territories, natural resources and information. This, I think, is the true intent of postindustrial tribalism which we are seeing – a mutation of the development, appropriation and imitation of the Malay feudalistic mentality, ironically led by the ‘national’ bourgesoisie. The clear and present danger in our postindustrial tribalistic world lies in the paradigm of multicultural education the government is relying upon.

Towards a ‘New Bumiputeraism’

As we have already seen, the official discourse of what passes for ‘multicultural education’ in Malaysia is highly circumscribed by the realities of a national discourse fundamentally calibrated to reproduce racial and ethnic inequalities even as it claims to represent a ‘national identity’. The problem of using such a race-based paradigm brings us to a difficult dialogue on culture, especially when we are planning to teach a subject as highly charged as ethnic studies. What this has meant in practice is that the teaching of ethnic studies has depended on a body of ‘official knowledge’ or a ‘grand narrative’ which is to be passed down to students so that they can regurgitate the facts and live with the information in an entirely unreflective and uncritical manner. Where will the thinking process come in? How will we develop critical sensibility – so that we may teach tolerance, battle bigotry, and adopt a cosmopolitan instead of communitarian view of race and ethnicity? Can our students question ‘truths produced’ and ‘realities invented’ in the name of history without getting into trouble with the authorities?

Culture is indeed a most problematic area of studies. In it lies the question of ‘truth’. Especially in Malaysia where the debate on race and ethnicity continues to rage – a debate that brings to issue that of political economy, power, ideology, truth, genealogy, archaeology of knowledge, the ‘order of things’, as Michel Foucault (1978) would say – the multiplicity of perspectives should not be ignored when speaking of race, racial constructs and illusions of racial superiority. We need a new approach – one based on the idea of a ‘new Bumiputeraism’. We need a new concept of ethnicity, a new perspective on race relations, and new strategies towards constructing a society based on peaceful coexistence. It is even more needed now after the 8 March 2008 elections when radical changes require Malaysians to design ways to educate each other on interracial, interethnic or crosscultural understanding.

Names connote and denote something. Words, like many sociolinguists would emphasise, carry metaphors and manifestations of history, material, power, knowledge and ideology. Worse still these words become institutions and become institutionalised into architectures of power and control. Writers such as Lewis Mumford (1966, 1980) and Jacques Ellul (2003) have analysed this phenomena of architectures of power as these structures relate to the nature of man within the context of the language in which he/she is situated. ‘Bumiputera’ is one such problematic word; one that assumes race and religion as one. To say that a Malay is generally a Muslim and hence a ‘Bumiputera’ and therefore has special rights and privileges is an imprecise way of explaining a concept. It is an outmoded approach to defining that word. We must find ways to enrich the concept better so that it will become inclusive. In doing so, we must ask who toils for the soil?

The old concept of ‘Bumiputera’ needs to be reconstructed so that we will have a better foundation in preparation for a redefinition in the federal constitution – so that the constitution can now protect all rather that the few. Isn’t democracy for the powerful few only good for plutocracy? Who is a ‘Bumiputera’? After some 50 years this term should have evolved and changed. The base and superstructure, the ideology and material foundation, and the body and spirit of this nation state called Malaysia have changed. The old definition has run its course. This is the right time to change. We must remember that words get refined and redefined in the course of history. Words like democracy, freedom, justice and equality get reconceptualised after every social revolution. Words like Malays, Indians, Chinese, East and West Malaysians used as classification systems were functional during the colonial period and in the early years of independence. They have lost their connotative and denotative power as we move into the sixth decade of independence. Language is reality – words become flesh, inscriptions become institutions. We must redefine what ‘Bumiputera’ means. Aren’t all Malaysians Bumiputera now?

‘New Bumiputeraism’, ‘radical multiculturalism’, ‘humanism’, ‘evolving self’, ‘alternative futures’, ‘social reconstructionism’, ‘people’s history’, ‘power and ideology’. All these concepts reflect a new lexicon and represent a new politics and can be taught to our students of this new Malaysia; to the young and curious minds that need a new understanding of Malaysian nationalism or ‘Bangsa Malaysia’. How do we teach these concepts? We can involve students in activities that allow them to explore the meanings and mechanisms of culture. We can have them examine the universal and the particular in human motivations, behaviours, attitudes, values and beliefs. We must expand their understanding of the dynamic nature of culture and increase their awareness of their own place in the global array of cultures and subcultures and the challenges and opportunities such situations present in crosscultural communications. We can get our students to construct alternative futures that draw out the ethical humanistic values into an integrative concept of ‘new Bumiputeraism’ based on the premise that we are all human beings sharing a living space in a time borrowed, and that the litmus test of it all is how we treat fellow human beings with knowledge, understanding and wisdom sound enough to make each other see beyond the lens of race, colour, creed.

I believe that if we resolve this issue of Bumiputera versus non-Bumiputera through education for peace, justice and tolerance, we will see the demise of race-based politics and the dissolution of political parties that champion this or that race. Ethnic studies as a vehicle of change for culture and consciousness can do the job but only through skilled trainers and educators who are colour blind. The challenge is this: Do we have colour blind professors and educators who will profess a colour blind ideology? I hope we have them in all our public universities. After all, their training should allow them to understand the subjectivity of culture, race and ethnicity. In fact, if we are sincere in developing our students’ intelligence, we should even have them revise our ethnic studies module from time to time – so that we may not be the ‘sage on stage’ but a ‘guide on the side’. Through time, space and place, we create these constructs to enable or disable our understanding of what it means to be human. Educators of multicultural ethnic studies must be trained to counter apartheid, bigotry, arrogance, racism, and the disabling of cultures through the art and science of teaching and through their own battle for mental liberation. If they can do it, this is going to be a great victory for Malaysian children of all races.

A New Pedagogy in the Making

In this regard, postcolonialism advocates a number of issues that are critically relevant within the field of multicultural education in general and ethnic studies in particular, and can be applied to the circumstances that face Malaysia today. First, postcolonialism is concerned with the project of decolonising knowledge – both in its Western form and its local mutation – and in the production of transformative knowledge. Second, postcolonialism challenges the discourse of nationalism that still remains a taboo subject in many official and academic circles, including the field of education. In the name of nationalism there have many instances of rhetorical rejection of Western knowledge and ideas over the last few decades. But much of this rhetoric has been little more than an ‘empty shell’ as Fanon puts it, since the hegemonic elite has used many of the same discursive weapons to subjugate, exclude and oppress other social groups as the colonial elites. And third, postcolonialism is concerned with questions of agency and how marginalised subjects are capable of resisting dominant discourses. This is especially significant in educational research and practice since agency is connected to the ability of subjects to contest dominant educational practices that place people in marginalised positions. As Spivak reminds us, the question of subaltern agency cannot be separated from the ongoing reconfiguration of power discourses which, for too long, have silenced their voices.

How do we then translate these propositions into a perspective of teaching? How do we move from the kinds of concepts suggested by the postcolonial project to classroom practice via curriculum design? The idea of a ‘new Bumiputeraism’ must be translated into the practice of education. Education is a deliberate effort to impart knowledge, skills, and values that can help students become good members of society. Education should not only be looked at from the perspective of ‘human capital revolution’ which is just the kind of mainstream rhetoric that Malaysian students have been fed for two decades and more in the name of ‘national development’. It must also address the complexities of the ‘whole child in mind, body, spirit and how this will in turn be functional in society’. The idea of postcolonial/multicultural education requires this whole child to be educated into becoming a cultural being first and a multicultural being next. It requires a good curriculum in multiethnic studies and the acquisition of skill and dispositions necessary for the child to function in an increasingly complex multicultural environment. To teach the concept of ‘new Bumiputeraism’ and to teach it effectively and affectively, we must make a radical changes to the enterprise of teaching itself. This means we must prepare our teachers, at all levels, to become effective multiculturalists and to teach multiculturalism.

In other words, our approach to teaching about cultures must radically change in order to teach about the ‘new Bumiputeraism’. We must look at culture not merely as ‘habits we acquire’ and the ‘tools’ we use but as ‘habits we acquire and the tools we use in houses we inhabit’. We must also recognise that Malaysia’s multiculturalism is an evolving system rather than a closed and parochial dimension of human existence. Our perspective must essentially be a constructivist one – one that looks at the cognitive, social, and emotional aspect of cultural change and how definitions of being this or that cultural group must also change as nations are influenced by the wave of globalisation.

How do we design a curriculum for this ‘new Bumiputeraism’, shifting our focus from an ethnocentric curriculum bent on using ‘nationalism’ as a foundation of the curricular base to deliver prepackaged content to one that questions content knowledge in a dialectical manner so that a more critical understanding can be constructed? This is, of course, a question that has confronted many multiracial societies around the world and has exercised the attention of a great many scholars and practitioners of multicultural education. One of the pioneering works in the field is Disrupting Preconceptions which offers particularly interesting views of the issue of the curriculum and change and draws on examples from the USA, Laos, Singapore, East Timor and South Africa among others (Hickling-Hudson et al., 2004). In a similar vein, Derek Mulenga’s (2009) recent edited collection, for example, offers an original and insightful analysis aimed to deepen our understanding of postcolonialism and education, drawing on case studies from North and South America and Africa. Similarly, a special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society is dedicated exclusively to examining the ‘contested terrain’ of postcolonialism and education using particularly interesting examples from the Caribbean (Rizvi et al., 2006). Here I draw on my own experience as an educator deeply involved in the design, development and delivery of multiethnic studies at university level. The proposition I outline is based on a modified version of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s course ‘Cross Cultural Perspectives’ (FDU, 2007).

In framing the aims of a new approach to multiethnic studies we need students to inquire into the phenomena of understandings and misunderstandings within and across human communities such that students:

1. Recognise that they find themselves somewhere within (or at several places within) a global series of cultures and subcultures.
2. Recognise that this fact of their situations poses opportunities and problems of communication and understanding within and across diverse groups of many kinds, locally, nationally, and globally.
3. Understand that cultures and subcultures to some extent make or shape people, and do so according to principles that include the way that power works.
4. Understand that culture by its nature also changes, and that people are among the agents of change, so that awareness of the ways that cultural systems work, and of how to negotiate sameness and difference, is indispensable to cultural coexistence at all levels.
5. Can discuss the different manifestations (e.g. cultural artifacts) that culture takes.
6. Can situate themselves within and in relation to that particular array of cultures and subcultures that comprises the peoples of Malaysia.

From these premises, we are in a position to outlines the goals of learning to be achieved through Malaysian multiethnic studies. By the end of course, students should be able to do the following:

• State the informal taxonomy of the many cultures that they can identify themselves at the micro and macro level.
• Recognise the utility as well as the limitation of the classic norms of describing a culture.
• Deconstruct ideological biases associated with the concept of race.
• Illustrate how cultures and subcultures make/shape people.
• Identify universalistic and particularistic examples of understanding different cultures.
• Identify processes of intercultural borrowing and how such borrowings make the ‘strange’ familiar.
• Discuss the universalistic versus particularistic approaches to the understanding of body and beauty.
• Demonstrate critical understanding of how popular media shape and inform our understanding of other cultures.
• Explain how and why the meaning of every day artifacts of culture (such as clothing) changes over time.
• Describe how cultures make and is made by people.
• Describe practices and behaviours that make culture.
• Articulate a working definition of religion and identify important dimensions of religion.
• Demonstrate an understanding of relationship between religion and culture.
• Recognise and articulate meaning behind familiar and unfamiliar religious practices.
• Demonstrate an understanding of how religious traditions change and, identify agents of change.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the fluid nature of religious identities and the unboundedness of religious communities in contemporary societies.
• Describe how cultures are made and remade by global (e.g. capitalism/globalisation, colonialism/imperialism) and national (e.g. communism) historical forces.
• Discuss that cultural remaking can be both forced and violent.
• Discuss that massive cultural disruptions and changes create winners and losers and that who wins and who loses depends on individual’s capacity for adaptation as well as existing power structures.
• Demonstrate the relationship between individuals and their culture.
• Discuss the dimensions of conflict and creativity in cultural change.
• Articulate their ‘personal cartography’ in cultural evolution.

In my view, this comprehensive set of learning outcomes will contribute significantly to the collective understanding of multiethnic Malaysia while, at the same time, acting as triggers for critical engagement and challenge the failures of imagination that have beset educational practices for too long.

Conclusion

Malaysia requires a new set of cultural analytical tools to construct a new educational paradigm that will meet the diverse needs of the country’s complex and dynamic population. It also needs an educational system that is inclusive and progressive and teaches students the ‘constructivist’ rather than ‘static’ aspect of culture. This is the value of postcolonial knowledge. Its assumptions in relation to the multiethnic studies agenda is that any approach to multiethnicity needs to create spaces for learners to engage with perspectives addressing complexity, uncertainty, contingency and difference. In this regard, the concept of ‘new Bumiputeraism’ precisely captures this kind of engagement and can be used as a starting point for building a new perspective on educational change. This concept can lead towards an ethical and critical agenda of reform based a genuine commitment to confronting the enduring problems of inequality and injustice based on ‘race’. If this change towards multiculturalism and the ‘new Bumiputeraism’ comes about, then we would have educated in Malaysia – as the great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1993) would say – ‘anak semua bangsa’ (child of all nations) in this ‘bumi manusia’ (earth for mankind).

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