The Ideological Struggle of Multicultural Nationalism: Cultural Identity in the 2014 Malaysian Top-Grossing Movie The Journey

Abstract

This study attempts to discover how multiculturalism interacts with sub-state nationalism as portrayed in the Malaysian top-grossing film of 2014 – The Journey directed by Chiu Keng Guan. The nature of Malaysian society and its colonial history might suggest that cultural interaction among its three major races (Malays, Chinese, and Indians) is a norm, but this study argues that the culture of these three major races as portrayed in the fictional film is made up of “systems of representations”; such systems of representations do not reflect the intentions of the subjects, but rather, actively construct meanings as conditions and instruments, signifying practice in reality. The application of in-depth interviews (e.g., the film director and the screenplay writer) discovered cultural identity depicted in the film as always having a specific ‘positionality’ within their representation, and the ideological struggle of multicultural nationalism embedded in the film is considered ‘nonsubjective’. The authors believe that every culture is local, but no culture is autochthonous, and cultural identity illustrated in the film can be regarded as ‘uniqueness of the soil’.