Uneasy Laughter: Critical Non-Synchronicity in Mat Tenggek

This paper considers how humor can be deployed to explore the temporal antagonisms of capitalist subsumption. It turns to the surrealist Malay comedy Mat Tenggek (1979) for an account of how the body, technology and nature are fused in ways to complicate the spatial reordering required for capitalism’s distinct value form to take hold. Key is how the film prefigures certain anxieties of development that still resonates in contemporary Malay politics. In this, I shall also explore how comedy is a productive avenue to locate incommensurabilities in combined and uneven development where the fusion of different temporalities modernisation demands meet impasses at which the developmental project is exposed for its oppressive fictions. This also positions the film as a productive resource to critique some of the key temporal assumptions in cyborg studies.

Date: 12 November 2019, Tuesday   

Time: 14:00 to 15:30 

Venue: F4B05 

             University of Nottingham Malaysia 

             Jalan Broga 43500 Semenyih Selangor Darul Ehsan     

About the speaker: 
Ahmad Fuad Rahmat is the Assistant Professor in Media and Digital Cultures at the School of Media, Languages and Cultures University of Nottingham Malaysia.