Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-5g6vh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T09:53:11.868Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unlearning History: Mark Teh and the Spectres of Baling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2022

KATIA ARFARA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Held in December 1955, the Baling talks represented a unique attempt to end the Malayan emergency through a negotiated peace between the British colonial government and the Malayan Communist Party, but it also marked the beginning of the Cold War in Asia. This paper focuses on Mark Teh's long-term investigations, as a researcher and theatre director for the Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur, into this historically significant Cold War event and its representation. Teh's performance Baling is examined as an exemplary collaborative project that expands Western definitions of the documentary theatre, while highlighting the continuing efforts of South East Asian artists to contest cultural regionalism and colonial knowledge systems. Drawing on Brechtian aesthetics and postcolonial theory, Teh appropriates diverse forms of politically engaged art in order to question the role of history and the archive in the solidification of nationalist ideologies and identity binaries in the post-war era.

Type
Article
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 63 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Founded in 1930, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was the most effective organizer of anti-Japanese resistance from 1941 to 1945, receiving some British assistance. From 1945 to 1948, it adopted a ‘united-front’ strategy. More than 90 per cent of participants were Chinese, with a minority of Malays and Indians. By early 1948, the MCP was struggling, so from March to May 1948, the MCP prepared for armed conflict. To this end, it increased violent support of labour disputes, but the leaders of British Malaya pre-empted communist plans by declaring a state of emergency in June 1948, now known as the ‘Malayan emergency’. Hack, Karl, ‘The Malayan Emergency as Counter-insurgency Paradigm’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32, 3 (June 2009), pp. 383–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here pp. 385–6.

2 In his historical account of the emergency told to Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor, Chin Peng said, ‘My public image had been transformed into a fearsome legend by a combination of carefully concocted propaganda and the world press’ natural inclination for the exploitation of crisis situations. Suddenly, this man was sitting opposite Tunku, Marshall and Tan in a Baling schoolroom. It would take a very dispassionate observer indeed to separate the man seeking peace, from Chin Peng the widely portrayed callous terrorist which, of course, I have never been.’ Peng, Chin, My Side of History (Singapore: Media Masters, 2003), p. 392Google Scholar. For a more critical view of the emergency see Chin, C. C. and Hack, Karl eds., Dialogues with Chin Peng (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), pp. 3–37Google Scholar.

3 Souchou Yao, The Malayan Emergency: A Small, Distant War (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016), p. 123.

4 In 2018 I invited the company to Athens as part of the Onassis Stegi's Fast Forward Festival, which I curated. The Greek staging coincided with the Malaysian general election in May 2018; the election marked the end of Barisan Nasional, the ruling coalition government composed of race-based parties led by the United Malays National Organization, which had been in power since Malaya's independence in 1957. Fahmi Fadzil became a Member of Parliament just moments before the group gave their first performance of Baling in Athens. Since then, three, and not four, performers have presented Baling.

5 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 121.

6 Okwui Enwezor, ‘Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument’, in Enwezor, ed., Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: Steidl/ICP, 2008), pp. 11–51, here p. 23.

7 Ibid., p. 26.

8 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 140.

9 A Notional History was presented as a work-in-progress at TPAM Yokohama in 2019. It explored various possibilities for rewriting the history of Malaysia after the 2018 general election. This documentary performance was centred on the new history textbook that was about to be produced by the new government and the unfinished documentary Revolution ’48 (2008) by Fahmi Reza. Version 2020 looked back to Vision 2020 and attempted to suggest alternate versions of Malaysia's future. It was the third part of the ‘Complete Futures of Malaysia’, a series of projects that kicked off in 2017 and unfolded locally and internationally over several years in multiple formats. Mark Teh, ‘An-Other May 13: An Ongoing History of Artistic Responses’, in Nur Hanim Khairuddin and Beverly Yong, eds., Reactions – New Critical Strategies: Narratives in Malaysian Art (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2013), pp. 98–113, here p. 108.

10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 108.

11 Meredith L. Weiss, ‘The Cold War's Legacies in Malaysia’, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, at https://kyotoreview.org/issue-26/the-cold-wars-legacies-in-malaysia, accessed 7 July 2020.

12 Helen Ting, ‘Malaysian History Textbooks and the Discourse of Ketuanan Melayu’, in Daniel P. S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden and Gaik Cheng Khoo, eds., Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 36–52, here pp. 47–8.

13 While the government-approved summary of the talks has long been widely available, the full transcript was not made public until 2006. Mark Teh, email to the author, 31 October 2020.

14 Mark Teh, ‘Mapping Multiplicities and Deconstructing History: Documentary Arts Practices in Malaysia 2004–2008’, master's thesis, Goldsmiths University of London, 2011, pp. 11–12.

15 Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 22.

16 Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), p. 199.

17 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh Kluwer, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 19–26, here p. 24.

18 Michelle Antoinette, Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 (Amsterdam: Brill, Cross/Cultures, 2014), p. 7.

19 Ibid., p. 6.

20 Ibid., p. 7.

21 Weiss, ‘The Cold War's Legacies in Malaysia’.

22 Ting, ‘Malaysian History Textbooks’, pp. 36–53 and 38.

23 Ibid., p. 50.

24 Freeman, Rewriting the Self, p. 21.

25 Weiss, ‘The Cold War's Legacies in Malaysia’.

26 Antoinette, Reworlding Art History, pp. 137 and 140.

27 Ibid., pp. 137 and 140.

28 Ibid., pp. 137 and 140.

29 Ken Takiguchi, ‘A Collective Invention: Locating Five Arts Centre in the Region’, in Kathy Rowland, ed., Staging History: Selected Plays from Five Arts Centre Malaysia, 1984–2014 (Kuala Lumpur: Five Arts Centre, 2015), pp. 14–21, here pp. 14–15.

30 Eugène van Erven, The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 25.

31 Teh, ‘Mapping Multiplicities’, pp. 50–1.

32 Mark Teh, ‘Playing with Dust: Reflections on Performing and Researching’, From Performance Research to Cultural Ecologies: Creating Sustainable Artistic Communities international conference, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 19–20 July 2019.

33 For more on this initial phase of Baling see the ‘Theatre-Making: From Text to Stage, from Stage to Text’ round table moderated by Carmen Nge in Staging History: Selected Plays from Five Arts Centre Malaysia, 1984–2014 (Kuala Lumpur: Five Arts Centre, 2015), pp. 29–33, here p. 33. See also Carmen Nge, ‘Baling Membaling 1955: Chin Peng meets Tunku’, Small Acts, 7 February 2006, at http://smallacts.blogspot.com/2006/02/baling-membaling-1955-chin-peng-meets.html, accessed 30 October 2020.

34 See Charlene Rajendran, ‘Baling in a Time of BERSIH: Embodying Historical Transcripts as Enactments of Resistance’, in Marcus Cheng Chye Tan and Charlene Rajendran, eds., Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 85–111, here pp. 86–7.

35 Van Erven, The Playful Revolution, pp. 21 and 37.

36 Ibid., p. 36.

37 Takiguchi, ‘A Collective Invention’, p. 16.

38 Mark Teh, email to the author, 31 October 2020.

39 Kam Raslan, ‘Fine Young Communists’, at www.kakiseni.com/articles/reviews/MDcwMg.html/all#top, accessed 7 July 2020.

40 Mark Teh, email to the author, 31 October 2020.

41 Kyoko Iwaki, ‘Five Arts Centre: The Emergence of a New Generation of Artists’, Japan Foundation, Performing Arts Network Japan, 21 December 2016, at https://performingarts.jp/E/pre_interview/1612/1.html, accessed 1 October 2020.

42 Maya: The Art and Cultural Institute for Development in Bangkok, Thailand, was founded in 1981 as an alternative theatre institute and non-governmental organization. Mark Teh, email to the author, 31 October 2020.

43 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 44.

44 Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, p. 19.

45 Examining Chin Peng's version of events and revisiting declassified documents, Hack proposes a ‘neo-orthodox’ or ‘post-revisionist’ case that the change in the Communist International line from ‘united-front’ political tactics to a ‘two-camp’ line was critical in causing armed communist uprisings on the Asian front in 1948. For more on multi-causal models of the outbreak of the Asian Cold War see Karl Hack, ‘The Origins of the Asian Cold War: Malaya 1948’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40, 3 (October 2009), pp. 471–96.

46 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 553.

47 For more on the oral archive see https://pusatsejarahrakyat.org/about.

48 Revolution ’48 was Fahmi Reza's sequel to 10 Tahun Sebelum Merdeka (10 Years before Independence, 2007).

49 Baling (Membaling) performance, unpublished transcript.

50 Ibid.

51 Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 147Google Scholar and 158.

52 Ibid., p. 34.

53 Ibid., p. 158.

54 Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, p. 44.