The Archive Performs: Malay Performance Traditions as Vessels for Islamic Histories and Identities in Sumatra

Abstract

This dissertation explores the history of Islam in maritime Southeast Asia, focusing on the transmission of Islamic knowledge to Indonesia’s island of Sumatra through pathways mobilized by the arts – journeys made possible by singing and dancing. Looking at dakwah (Islamic proselytization) performance generally and two Sumatran dakwah traditions specifically (salawat dulang and zapin), my research shows how Islamization in the Malay archipelago demanded local individual agency in the formation of Malay Islamic cultural identity. Chapter One discusses the emergence of racialized Malayness in colonial discourses that set a persistent image against which Malay artisans and their traditions were assessed; Chapter Two considers the organization of self-identifying Indonesian Islamic artists and their responses to how the arts fit into changing religious and national identities at the cusp of violent anticommunism and a regime change in the 1960s; and Chapters Three and Four focus on the history and development of two specific dakwah traditions, salawat dulang and zapin, as embodied and oral traditions employed by practitioners to reflect local understandings of Islam in numerous ways. This dissertation contributes new ways of thinking about the performing arts as sites of Islamic cultural knowledge production, the permissibility of art within Islamic practice, and the global diversity of Islam not only through regional variation but also through the varying representations of Islam as performed tradition. In addressing such issues, this project engages a combined methodological approach drawing upon archival analysis, oral history, and dance ethnography to interrogate textual sources and performing bodies together. This approach brings together material from London, Jakarta, and the Indonesian provinces of West Sumatra and Riau in Sumatra.