Javanese Wayang Kulit in Malaysia: Early Diasporas and Current (trans)Locality(ies)

Abstract

The transmigration program was initiated by the Dutch in the 1910’s and continued to develop with the Indonesian government after independence in 1945, making it one of the largest resettlements schemes of the 20th century. The program aimed to resettle communities from Java, Madura, Bali, and Lombok to other less populated islands of the archipelago. During this time, Javanese communities moved to Malaya establishing Javanese settlements in Johor, Selangor, and Perak, present-day states of Malaysia. This presentation discusses a Javanese transmigrant community in Malaysia and the negotiation of a Javanese identity within a different national context in Johor, Malaysia. Despite being an ethnic majority in Java, the Javanese become minorities in the new locale, (re)defining ethnic signifiers through the performing arts while adjusting to the new provincial and national context respectively. An analysis of Wayang Kulit allows an investigation of the production of (trans)locality, considering encounters with the ‘other’, and geographical translocality vis-à-vis community, ethnic, and cultural translocalities beyond geographical conceptualizations (see Appadurai 1996). The tensions between “cultural homogenization” and “cultural heterogenization” are negotiated by the culture bearers which in turn manoeuvre both the production of locality at the micro level and translocality at the macro level outside Java. Re-evaluating anglophone dyadic conceptualizations of homogenization/diversification, this presentations considers the “in-betweens” of the fluid conceptualization of “communitas” as alternative modernities (Gaonkar, 2001) particularly for minority communities in maritime Southeast Asia.