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4pm - 5:30pm | 31 July 2025
Rm 3.369, HC Coombs Building, 9 Fellows Road, Acton, ANU
This talk examines the cultural and political genealogy of Boria, a carnivalesque performance heritage from Penang, through its entanglement with 19th-century
Indian Ocean ritual forms and colonial urban modernity. Often celebrated today as Malay heritage, Boria emerged from a layered history of Shi’ite devotional practices, Muharram street processions, and the socio-political life of convict and migrant communities
in the Straits Settlements. Drawing on archival sources, maps, and early 20th-century ethnographic records, I trace how Boria reconfigured ritual mourning into comedic street theatre, combining syair poetry, music, dance, and role-play. In doing so, it reflected
and refracted the aspirations of kampung-based communities at the margins of George Town’s commercial centre. I argue that Boria functioned not only as popular entertainment but as a form of subaltern political expression under colonial rule. The talk also
considers Boria’s disavowed connections to the koli kallen tradition (associated with masked and black-faced children), exploring how such figures gesture to transregional visual cultures of mourning and satire, particularly through their link to the tragic
lover Majnun in the romance epic of Leila and Majnun. Ultimately, the story of the Muharram in the Malay World presents an embodied counter history of affective, social, and spatial negotiations. The talk foregrounds the emotional labour of coexistence in
a multicultural port city, challenging fixed racial, religious, and aesthetic ideals through theatrical appropriation and play in a high-camp performance of longing and belonging.
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