Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore (review)

Jacqueline Lo's Staging Nation is a welcome addition to a small but growing field of scholarship in postcolonial Southeast Asian theatre studies. Countering postmodern discourses celebrating the erosion of national borders, Lo begins with the contention that "despite assertion from certain quarters of cultural studies of the ascendancy of the postnational in the face of increasing globalization, nationalism remains the cornerstone of popular constructions of collective identity" (1). Lo sees Malaysia and Singapore as examples of strong states in which nationalism continues its stronghold on postcolonial governance, marking the contours and centrality of national boundaries as "political project" and "lived reality" (1) for their citizenry.

The book offers close readings of four theatre productions/texts from the 1980s that Lo considers exemplary of "the overtly political turn" in the history of Malaysia and Singapore's English-language theatre practice. It considers the performative and textual strategies used by local English-language theatres for alternative imaginings of national culture, through what Lo calls the "up-staging" and "re-staging" of hegemonic nationalism, and the "reassembling [of] identity and culture" (3) for community expression. Yet, rather than merely articulating a counterdiscourse of nationalist belonging, Lo draws on Homi Bhabha's notion of ambivalence to arrive at a critical articulation of agency situated between "the politics of representation and the politics of intervention in relation to the construction of the nation" (2). Such a formulation leads her to a rich set of inquiries around the performativity of national construction and the political ontology of performance in the two nations. Lo argues that the contingencies and provisionalities of postcolonial theatre result in "alternative, multiple and contending narratives of nation" (3).

The first two chapters of the book, "Scripting the Nation" and "Conditions of Production," map out a useful genealogy of national performance in Malaysia and Singapore as postcolonial states unshackled from British rule in the late 1950s. Juxtaposing the two nations in a comparativist historical framework, Lo analyzes the divergent paths undertaken by the Malaysian and Singaporean governments in their respective formulations of national culture, particularly along the racialized faultlines of bumiputera-ismin the case of Malaysia,and multicultural ideology in Singapore. Lo surveys the histories and debates of national ethnoculturalist issues ranging from "Asian versus Western values," the cultural nationalism of language-centered policies regulating literary and artistic production, to colonial legacies of race-based imaginings that inform the communalism of both nations. Lo sees national directives and racialized imaginings as scripts of the postcolonial state. By viewing such national projects as performative articulations, Lo aims to show that the nation-space is "precisely the space in which theatre and other forms of cultural production circulate" (30). Theatre, according to Lo, enacts but also exposes the state's ideologies while staging alternative ways of (un-)scripting the nation.

Each of the next four chapters devotes itself to a close reading of a theatre text. The first two are from Malaysia, the latter two from Singapore: The Cord (1984), 1984 Here and Now (1985), Emily of Emerald Hill (1983), and The Coffin Is Too Big for The Hole (1986). Lo reads the English-language theatre of both nations in the 1980s as "a site of both the legitimation and the subversion of power" (166). With a keen eye to this dramatic paradox, Lo contextualizes her readings of each play within a shifting set of power matrices (from colonial to statist technologies) that are specific to the sociocultural and historical realities of each nation. For instance, Lo traces the politicization of Malaysia's English-language theatre to the production of K. S. Maniam's The Cord,arguing that the play negotiates between pro-bumiputera cultural nationalism and the critique of non-Malay marginalization against the complex backdrop of decolonization. From this standpoint, the use of English in Malaysia's theatre is a politically charged issue. The incorporation of Indo-Malaysian oral and visual elements emphasizes the play's national dimensions by recuperating the...