TALK: The Work of Lat in the Age of Globalizability

Visual Art Department, Cultural Centre, University of Malaya presents

VISIONS OF MODERNITY: THE WORK OF LAT IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZABILITY

a public talk by Dr. Fiona Lee

Date: 18 February 2017 (Saturday)
Time: 2.30pm - 4.30pm
Venue: THE CUBE**, Cultural Centre, Dewan Tunku Canselor, University of Malaya.

ALL ARE WELCOME

** THE CUBE is the glass-covered lecture room beside the Dewan Tunku Canselor.

This talk considers the role that translation plays in the making of Lat as national icon. The rise of Lat’s professional career as a cartoonist largely coincided with the era of economic liberalisation led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad (1981-2003).

From a cultural standpoint, Mahathir’s Vision 2020 plan to achieve fully developed status for the country introduced the concept of bangsa Malaysia, which marked a shift from a Malay ethno-nationalist to a multiracial understanding of national culture. However, existing policies reflecting the former remained in place and the latter was vaguely defined.

Arguably, Lat’s work gave bangsa Malaysia visual expression that took hold in the popular imagination,generating a graphic vocabulary for representing the nation. Today, Lat’s work is not only recognisable as a national icon to his fellow compatriots, but to international audiences as well.

To understand Lat’s appeal to readers of different language and cultural backgrounds both at home and abroad, I examine the centrality of cultural translation in and compare the different language versions of his most popular work, The Kampung Boy.

Rather than simply see his work as a feel-good image of Malaysian cultural diversity, I suggest that analysing the translatability—or globalizability—of Lat’s works affords insights into understanding how the infrastructures of cultural representation—that is, the complex arrangement of different state institutions, arts communities, the global literary marketplace, and multiple reading publics—shape ideologies of race, nation, and modernisation.

SPEAKER'S BIO

Dr. Fiona Lee is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She researches and teaches in the fields of postcolonial studies, 20th and 21st-century literature, and cultural studies. Her research explores the history of decolonisation and the cold war in Southeast Asia, with a particular interest in Malaysia and Singapore, through the prisms of literature and the arts. She earned her Ph.D in English and a Women’s Studies Certificate at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2014. At CUNY, she taught literature and writing courses, as well as participated in various digital teaching and learning initiatives. From 2014-2016, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cultural Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.