Sacred cows and crashing boars : ethno-religious minorities and the politics of online representation in Malaysia

Abstract

Starting with the incident now known as the cow’s head protest, this article traces and unpacks the events, techniques, and conditions surrounding the representation of ethno-religious minorities in Malaysia. The author suggests that the Malaysian Indians’ struggle to correct the dominant reading of their community as an impoverished and humbled underclass is a disruption of the dominant cultural order in Malaysia. The struggle is also among the key events to have set in motion a set of dynamics—the visual turn—introduced by new media into the politics of ethno-communal representation in Malaysia. Believing that this situation requires urgent examination the author attempts to outline the problematics of the task.