-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
By Ooi Kee Beng. PEM July 2011 Editorial Malaysians are known to be multilingual as a rule, especially in urban or semi-urban areas where flows of cultures mingle. This mingling can take place in an ad hoc and spontaneous manner like at a market place; or in a more regularized way like at a work … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng [Article for the photograph exhibition by Wei Leng Tay — Discordant Symmetries, held at Baba House, Singapore on September 2011 to March 2012] WE ALL TRAVEL more or less nowadays, and every good trip tweaks our perspective of state, society and self to some extent. Numerous short trips leave us with … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng I REMEMBER fidgeting for endless hours on the Internet back in the mid-1990s. To be honest, that was the reason why my studies took so long to complete. The browser available then was a little application called NCSA Mosaic. There were very few pages to go to at that time, to … Continue reading
Ooi Kee Beng | 21 Sept 2010 Comment in Malaysiakini.com IN MOST WAYS, Selangor and its politics cannot help but set the tone for Malaysian governance in the years to come. The federation succeeds or fails, depending on what happens in this key state. One could go so far as to claim that the nature … Continue reading
— By Ooi Kee Beng THE MALAYSIAN INSIDER, APRIL 30, 2010 — Ethnocentrism is not the opposite of multiracialism. For some reason, we tend to suppose it to be so. The truth of the matter is, the contradistinction between the two is political, not logical. Like all terms that lend themselves to political polarisation, these two … Continue reading
Review of A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahathir (MPH, 2011) This long-awaited autobiography is more about the political than the personal. By Ooi Kee Beng For The Star, Friday March 25, 2011 BELIEVE it or not, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has been a part of Malaysian politics since World War … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng THE PASSING of Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu in November last year threw a challenge to all serious scholars of Malaysian history. Not much has so far been written about him. No doubt most books on the country’s political history do mention episodes such as his successful challenge against Tan Cheng … Continue reading
Editorial for December 2011 By Ooi Kee Beng, Something that increasingly troubles me is the received supposition that urbanites are cosmopolitan by virtue of being urbanites. Not only does that bias attribute what in modern eyes is a morally desirable quality to the mere experience of living in densely populated areas, it also assigns the … Continue reading
Editorial, November 2011, By Ooi Kee Beng IN THE DAYS before nation states, polities in Southeast Asia were largely trading ports. These dots, constituted the maritime routes along which fortune-seekers of old travelled. All sorts – those with brains as much as much as those with brawn – went where conditions were most promising for the moment. … Continue reading
Penang Profile One hot afternoon in July, Ooi Kee Beng sat down at a Muslim cafe on Kandahar Street in Singapore for a cold Arabic coffee and a chat with one of Penang’s many big names in the academic world. Professor Ho Eng Seng, a Penang Free School alumnus, shared with him some of the … Continue reading
Wikibeng 