The Journal of Islamic Studies has featured a review by Martin van Bruinessen of From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop.
My chapter is described as follows:
Amrita Malhi discusses an even more ephemeral Ottoman ‘presence’ in Malaya in the enigmatic appearance of an Ottoman or Republican Turkish flag (the ‘Bendera Stambul’) in the 1928 peasant uprising of Terengganu.
I’m speaking on the Griffith Review panel at Adelaide Writers’ Week, as one of the authors featured in Issue 55: ‘State of Hope,’ focused on South Australia.
My panel is at 12pm on Wednesday 8 March, on the West Stage. More details are available on the Writers’ Week program.
Image: National Library of Australia.
I’m speaking on the Griffith Review panel at the National Library of Australia, as one of the authors featured in Issue 55: ‘State of Hope,’ focused on South Australia.
The panel is at 6pm on Tuesday 21 February, in the Theatre on the Lower Ground Floor. More details are available from the National Library.
I’ve had an essay published in Griffith Review, in a special issue called ‘State of Hope’, focused on South Australia as a testing ground for government-led social reform since the era of former Premier Don Dunstan.
I haven’t been able to participate in any of the nostalgia for South Australia’s past, having only arrived just as Mike Rann was replaced with Jay Weatherill. All the same, my essay addresses contemporary possibilities for new rounds of social reform, in this case in relation to how state governments “manage” the growing cultural diversity of their populations through the policy framework we refer to as multiculturalism.
The essay reflects on my experience organising InterculturAdelaide, a policy co-design workshop I convened in 2015, and of navigating the multicultural arena and the way it insists on assigning non-white Australians within discrete and bounded cultural silos. These silos are then targeted by political parties in their competitive quest to mobilise each cultural “community” as a supportive political constituency. Yet surely a focus on equitable interaction across purported cultural boundaries is a better approach for equipping Australians to navigate their own society and their increasingly multipolar region?
The essay, ‘Intercultural Futures: The Fraught Politics of Multiculturalism,’ is available for purchase from Griffith Review.
Image: Former US Attorney-General Loretta E. Lynch addressing Washington journalists over the Department of Justice investigation into funds misappropriated from state development fund 1MDB. Photo: Reuters/James Lawler Duggan, selected by East Asia Forum.
Today, I published a second op-ed in a series of two pieces featured by East Asia Forum, this time looking forward to how international developments might make life difficult for Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, especially if they are capitalised on politically by the opposition alliance headed by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
The full text of the opinion piece is below.
The international fallout from Najib’s 1MDB scandal
Author: Amrita Malhi, ANU
The international consequences of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s handling of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal will likely continue to escalate. The affair concerns US$800 million from the development fund that investigators believe to have passed through Najib’s personal bank accounts, in addition to other funds believed to have moved through foreign intermediaries and investment vehicles.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. Imaged selected by East Asia Forum.
Today, I published a summary in East Asia Forum of the domestic politics surrounding Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak at the end of 2016.
Najib might seem to have sealed up every institution he can access to ensure he cannot be toppled, but he still needs to ensure that his Barisan Nasional government can outmanoeuvre the opposition alliance with former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad at its helm.
This is because it is no longer enough for successive Barisan governments to simply win electoral contests that are designed to deliver victory to them in any case, they also need to ensure they rule with a modicum of legitimacy.
The full text of the article is below.
Najib fights to retain control after 1MDB scandal
Author: Amrita Malhi, ANU As 2016 draws to a close, Najib Razak remains Malaysia’s prime minister. This is despite two years of scandal, scrutiny and speculation over funds missing from state development fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), including US$800 million that is believed to have passed through his personal bank accounts.
Najib quickly shut down Malaysian investigations into 1MDB in 2015. Yet external agencies and media sources have since tracked what they believe is an international chain of transactions enabling billions to allegedly be siphoned out of the fund, through foreign banks, funds, shell companies and the prime minister’s personal contacts.
The American journal, International Journal of Turkish Studies has published a review by Elizabeth Lambourn of From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, to which I contributed a chapter on the Ottoman connection in colonial Terengganu.
Lambourn picks up an important point – that the material culture of the Ottoman connection, including physical signs like the flag used in Terengganu – was essential to the circulation of notions of connectedness to a Caliphate and a Muslim World beyond the Malay Peninsula. This is in addition to the intangible signs of this connection, including rumours of Ottoman intervention, which also played an important role in Terengganu.
Lambourn has also noticed my “detailed, high-quality maps,” created by the CartoGIS unit in the College of Asia & the Pacific at the Australian National University. This is a critical resource, and institutional access to it was critical to these maps existing at all.
Cover of the journal Southeast Asian Studies
The Kyoto-based journal Southeast Asian Studies has published a review by R. Michael Feener of the edited volume From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, in which I published a chapter.
Feener’s comments on my work are:
Amrita Malhi’s chapter opens a window onto previously under-appreciated dimensions of anti-British uprisings in early twentieth-century Malaya through her explorations of the “subterranean symbolic life” of the Ottoman Empire in Muslim Southeast Asia—and in particular in the ritual and political imaginations of Malay “secret societies.”
Mahathir (left) and Anwar (Photo: Reuters).
My thoughts have been included in a great piece by Holly Robertson in the Southeast Asia Globe on the unlikely renewed alliance between Anwar Ibrahim and Mahathir Mohamad, an alliance born of both men agreeing that their much larger, mutual problem of Prime Minister Najib Razak is worth combining forces over.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak speaks at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, Germany, 27 September 2016. (Photo: EPA/Bernd Von Jutrczenka)
I was happy to give Logan Connor some comments for his article today in the Southeast Asia Globe, which talked about Najib using social welfare programs in the 2017 budget as a way to salvage his damaged reputation. You can read the full article here, and I’ve put my contribution below.
“Najib’s reputation has certainly been dented, yet it appears he is taking the view that offence is the best defence. It seems he will campaign on a mixture of issues related to Malay Muslim uplift, such as social welfare and mobility, and Malay Muslim unity.”