Speaker: Dr Mulaika Hijjas, Lecturer in South East Asian Studies at SOAS University of London
Date : Thursday, 13 February 2020
Time : 11:00 am
Venue : AS8 #06-46, Singapore 119260
ABSTRACT
This talk will discuss ways in which the libraries of the Malay world, put asunder by colonial intervention in the 18th and 19th centuries, may be conceptually reassembled. It will argue that rather than considering Malay manuscripts as lone texts, they should also be studied as embedded within collections from specific times, places and social milieux. The study of libraries in the western Islamic world has been carried out to powerful effect, but the consensus hitherto has been that the Malay world lacked comparable institutions. However, even the sparse surviving evidence indicates that there were three distinct types of libraries that existed up to the 19th century: the palace, the Islamic school and the commercial lending libraries. Case studies of each of these will be discussed, attending to what can be gleaned regarding the communities of scribes, reciters and readers that were associated with these libraries. The talk will also present the ongoing Malay Transcription Project as a crucial component of the larger endeavour of rebuilding these libraries, engaging communities with their literary heritage, and returning texts to public circulation.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Originally from Kuala Lumpur, Dr Mulaika Hijjas is Lecturer in South East Asian Studies at SOAS University of London, where she specialises in the Malay manuscript tradition but also teaches literature and cultural studies of the region. She has an undergraduate degree in Literature from Harvard College; an MA in Islamic history from Oxford; and a PhD from SOAS on nineteenth-century narrative poetry by women from Riau. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at SOAS from 2009-14. Her monograph, Victorious Wives: The Disguised Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Malay Syair, was published by NUS Press in 2010, and her articles have appeared in Indonesia and the Malay World, The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and South East Asia Research. She was co-managing editor of Indonesia and the Malay World from 2016 to 2019.
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