Casting Shadows over Malay: Palliating Voice, Palliating the Wayang

Abstract

Wayang Kulit shadow puppetry has, for over one millennium, enacted both political and secular voice, for the maintenance of cultural heritage and social critical opinion. Throughout Malaysia, Wayang has mediated shifts in language ideologies and socialization. Yet, shifts in the Wayang have correlated positively with shifts in the Malay language, in light of Malaysian government efforts to palliate social voice through its control of Wayang and the Malay language and its poetics. This paper addresses the Wayang Kulit and its relevant to the Malay language, as well as its semiotic complexities during performance and in larger society, as a tool for the expansion or suppression of critical social voice. The study exposes these shifts in the Wayang, its stylizations, symbolisms, and its performativities, in the latter 20th century. These changes have aligned with cultural and language shifts, against government attempts to legitimize both pro Islamic and neoliberal ideologies. The data set includes a multi-year ethnography of the Wayang in Malaysia, and a corpus of discussions, documentations, and scripts of Wayang performances and narratives, grounded in an abduction theory methodical framework.