-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
By Ooi Kee Beng for Penang Economic Monthly, August 2011 Standfirst: Leaving one place does not mean that you have a definite destination in mind. For Tan Thean Peng, the conditions of a journalistic career saw him working for a long line of employers throughout the region, from Sydney to Bangkok to Hong Kong. Finally, … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng for TODAY │ 11 July 2011 AFTER THE EVENTS of July 9 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak could be making a mistake if he calls snap elections any time soon. A day after the police suppression of the Bersih 2.0 demonstration, he continued using a confrontational tone … 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 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
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
Editorial, September 2011 By OOI KEE BENG THE BIGGEST trick that the nation-state concept has pulled on modern man is the proposal that there is an essential line between the external and the internal. Sovereignty over precisely demarcated physical territory is the underlying notion. It is here the nation-state is most easily understood. And so, … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng in Southeast Asian Studies Vol 41. No. 2, September 2003 [http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/seas/41/2/410202.pdf ] Abstract Eurocentrism continues to inform the political discourses of former colonies like Malaysia to a large extent. Solid ethnicities were constructed and concretized, first conceptually and later through institutional means, to ease the governance of distant lands by Europeans … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, in SARI 21 (2003), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. pp.57-75 [http://www.ukm.my/~penerbit/sari21-05.pdf] Abstract: As interest in Southeast Asia increases in tandem with the region’s economic development, and lately as a result of global tensions, Islam as cultural and political factor is now of such importance that the academic division of Southeast Asia into a … Continue reading
Wikibeng 