Last August, the Malaysian government signed a protocol with the Chinese government to allow for the export of frozen whole Malaysian durians to China. This is both good news for Chinese consumers (the largest market in the world for durians) and the Malaysian economy, though stories of deforestation to make way for durian plantations have led to a Temiar blockade in Gua Musang, and also threaten tiger habitat. This presentation follows the durian as it is poised to become a new plantation crop to feed the China market. The thorny durian paradoxically functions as a sign of Malaysia’s ‘soft’ power in China, even as relations between the two governments were tested when PM Mahathir cancelled several major infrastructural projects after coming back to power in 2018.
There are two parts of this narrative of the durian’s journey: its felicitous journey east and its more treacherous journey to the ‘west’ that may encounter instances of hostility and abuse. Note the UK #AbusiveChocolate campaign that highlighted the prevalence of domestic abuse by using the durian coated in chocolate to represent domestic violence (14 Feb 2019). In going global, will Malaysian durians face the threat of losing their deeply polarising smell? After all, the odourless durian has been developed in Thailand in 2007. Can its ‘cultural odour’, which is both its strength and weakness and to play with Koichi Iwabuchi’s concept of a non-universalising local particularity, survive the journey to the ‘west’, even if it retains popularity in the East? Or should durian tours be the answer: to attract foreigners (from east and west) to come to Malaysia? Exploring the aspects of the Malaysian durians’ identity in differentiating itself from Thai varieties that dominate the global market, I posit agritourism as one way to maintain the Malaysian durian’s uniqueness.
Details
Date: 22 October 2019, Tuesday
Time: 14:00 to 15:30
Venue: F4B05
University of Nottingham Malaysia
Jalan Broga 43500 Semenyih Selangor Darul Ehsan
About the Speaker:
Dr Gaik Cheng Khoo is Associate Professor of Film and Television at the School of Media, Languages and Cultures. She is also the Director of the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute, Malaysia. Her research interests span across film, food, civil society, politics, cosmopolitanism, and citizenship and migration. She has published numerous articles on the independent filmmaking in Malaysia and Southeast Asia; Malaysian food heritage and identity and on the civil society organisation, Bersih. Her book publications include Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature (University of British Columbia Press, 2005), and Eating Together: Food, Space and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore (co-authored with Jean Duruz, Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) and co-edited volumes and journal special issues, Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (eds. Goh, Gabrielpillai, Holden and Khoo, Routledge, 2009), Malaysia’s New Ethnoscapes and Ways of Belonging (eds. Khoo and Lee, Routledge 2015), Special Issue on Indonesian Cinema (Khoo and Barker Asian Cinema 2010), special issue on Southeast Asian Cinema (eds. Khoo and Siddique Harvey, Asian Cinema 2007), Special Issue on Southeast Asian Cinema (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2007). Her 2 current research projects include a political economy of the durian and “Modernity, Temporality and Happiness: Korean migrants in Malaysia.”