Understanding Memelaysia : Racialised Memes as Testament to the Complexities of Malaysian Ethnic Relations

by Muhammad Farhan Shahmi bin Abdullah, University of Nottingham Malaysia

In this essay I argue the prevalence of racialised memes as a form of attestation towards the intricacies of Malaysian ethnic relations. Racialised memes herein refers to Internet memes encoded with content which feature discursive elements related to race and ethnicity. This essay firstly explores how memes, in general, are a form of formidable cultural transmission, and thus provides a theoretical lens for analysing culture. Then, this essay considers how racialised memes communicate existing sentiments of racial disparity in the Malaysian identity as informed by Malaysia’s socio-political history. This essay then presents an inquiry towards the construction of racialised memes as an emergent cultural practise.  The arguments in this essay shall be conducted through the lens of cultural politics as informed by the theories of Raymond Williams through ‘culture is ordinary’ and structure of feelings, and supported by a reading of Graham K. Brown’s view of the influences Malaysian education had towards national identity formation, as well as Richard Dawkins’s notion of mimesis.

1. BACKGROUND

The conceptual origin of memes as a unit of cultural significance can be traced from the field of anthropology. Memes, or mimesis, was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976) to refer to miniscule units of cultural artifacts, which serve as the building blocks to culture, that passes on from person to person, slowly scaling into a large-scale cultural phenomenon. Dawkins’s conception of memes was concerned with understanding the origin, spread and proliferation of cultural artifacts such as ideas, song melodies, clothing fashions, slangs, and beliefs. Dawkins argued that culture, despite originating from human ideation, had evolved to become a conceptual entity, or memeplex, which survives through the complex relationships between different converging memes (ibid., 1976). Dawkins provided the example of the Church or Christianity, which he described as an entity sustained by memes such as beliefs, rituals, and behaviours, converging around the central meme: the belief of an almighty deity. As such, the anthropological study of mimesis places importance on the dissection of memes which proliferate on a person-to-person micro level, as they often inform a perspective to understanding the ontology of larger social phenomena.

This anthropological position informs a foundational approach to the understanding of Internet memes. However, as developments in commu-nications technology such as the Internet and social media rapidly expedited the spread of information on a larger scale, this shift necessitates an elaborate description of modern memes, as well as an expounded inquiry into their spread. As such, contemporary communications scholars Knobel and Lankshear (2007) described memes as ideas which manifest through visual illustrations, words, distinct and specific uses of language, and other forms of cultural artifacts that are observed to possess swift acceptance and proliferation. Generally, memes that circulate around the Internet tend to manifest “..in the form of edited image macros with accompanying texts, viral videos, or text screenshots” (Muhammad Abdullah, 2021). The proliferation of Internet memes in the modern era can be attributed to what is known as the “sharing” culture, described to be a quintessential experience and activity in social media usage, whereby the two functions of sharing content, namely communication and distribution overlap (John, 2012). In other words, the action of sharing a meme could constitute an intimate person-to-person communication, or a “broadcast” of the content from one person to a collective of people thereby distributing the content, or even both, simultaneously. Additionally, another distinct feature of Internet memes which aids the uptake of memes is the ability to experience variations and emulations, which allows the meme to be encoded with different content and messages (Shifman, 2014). As such, the sharing of memes does not merely constitute a passive re-distribution of content, but a participatory action of authoring and embedding content to memes. As a result, these individual-level actions then scale towards a culture of meme production, recoding and sharing, thus manifesting as a shared cultural phenomenon or memeplex, as per Dawkins. The process of meaning-making for individual memes then relies on these complex interplays, as it relies on intertextuality to fully comprehend the meanings behind memes (Pavlovic, 2016). As such, Internet memes rely on their relationship to other memes in the wider cultural memeplex consisting of other Internet memes, or popular culture and social contexts in general.

As memes not only enable, but also incentivise the encoding of different content to be part of a distributed cultural artifact, this allows the existence of various niches of memes which engage on a variety of themes, from rather casual engagements with banal elements such as the LOLCat and Doge memes, to the normative discussions of rather serious topics such as political memes. Within the broad pantheon of meme niches, racialised memes are of particular interest for this essay. Racialised memes, I argue, are memes which feature content that, advertently or inadvertently, contains undertones of racial and ethnic features.

Existing scholarship on racialised memes vary on their stances towards the implications raised through the proliferation of racialised memes. Fairchild (2020) argued that racialised memes allow the transmission of racist ideologies through the manifestation of racial stereotypes (as exemplified in Fig. 1), microaggressions, and racial slurs. Fairchild added that the representations of racism perpetuate the positioning of marginalised racial groups as outcasted in dominant society, covertly and overtly rationalise and vindicate racist beliefs. Alternatively, Williams (2020) argued that racialised memes allow for the satirisation of racism, positioning racist actions and individuals as the object of ridicule. By “making fun” of racist ideas and caricatures, racialised memes exist as a way of resisting oppressive ideologies, by highlighting the example of the Karen meme as a critique against White surveillance of Black activities in open spaces. In mediating these two opposing opinions, I respond to both views by arguing that the cultural practice racialised memes is still incomplete, as such it is rather difficult to fully ascertain its contribution (or resistance thereof) to dominant racial ideologies, a view I shall later expound in this essay using Raymond Williams’s understanding of the structure of feelings.

In the context of the Malaysian memeplex, racialised memes often feature undertones of racial humour which speaks to the local context of ethnic relations. This type of racial humour presents itself similar to Fairchild’s idea of the manifestation of racial ideologies in memes: that is through the stereotyping of Malaysian ethnicities to actions or attributes, such as Malays are lazy, Indians are drunkards, and Chinese are sly and cunning; microaggressions such as the equation of Malaysian Chinese with the mainland Chinese individuals who carry COVID-19; and racial slurs such as “apunene” in reference to Malaysian Indians. The transmission of racialised memes can be observed in major social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit. Certain sites, such as the Facebook page Sad Cina Memes for Malaysian Teens feature heavy use of racialised memes with references to contemporary cultural issues. For example, Fig. 2 features a meme from the said page, featuring a comparison of stereotypical beliefs and actions related to the Malay and Chinese ethnic groups.

2. MEMES ARE ORDINARY: THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MEMES

In order to analyse racialised memes in the perspective of cultural politics, I employ Raymond William’s notion of culture as ordinary. For Williams, culture is not a fixed eternal entity which presupposes a distinct and uniform view in the minds of people. Rather, the view of culture from Williams’s perspective is developed from his understanding of society, which is the convergence of values and objectives from the members of the society, and its growth marked by active discourse and changes “… under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land” (Williams, 2002, p. 92). This understanding of society thereby informs his view that culture is ordinary, which is composed of the drawn-out process of learning known values and directions to facilitate communications within society, as well as the testing of these values and directions in everyday life, leading to new discoveries, conclusions, and meanings. (ibid., 2002, p. 92) In assessing the claim that culture only refers to the high-culture practices and norms lived by the aristocracy and the elite, Williams opposed this definition as it exists only as a belief which allows the maintenance of domination and power by the elite classes, all the while separating themselves from ‘common folk’. However, it is important to note that this refutation does not necessitate Williams positioning its direct inversion, which is low-brow culture emanating from the ‘lower classes’, as the only form of culture either. For Williams, both high and low cultures are simultaneously valid forms of culture, as culture can be defined and found in the most normative of human actions and activities “… both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings.” (ibid., 2002: 92) Additionally, in engaging with the works of F.R. Leavis, Williams agreed that formal artistic culture, which manifest in the form of literature and visual arts, cannot be separated from social life, and that they indeed both exert influence towards, and are shaped by the influence of society, though Williams then added that as culture does not need to derive from high society to be valid, artistic expressions deriving from the ‘lower classes’ should not be overlooked as well (ibid., 2002, p. 97). This understanding informs the notion that regardless of its origins, the artistic medium constitutes a persuasive form of cultural expression.

As such, through the lens of Raymond Williams, memes can be seen as a formidable form of cultural expression, proliferating in a culture of shared values and objectives. Whilst memes – due to their normative, humour-oriented, and at times absurd nature – do not generally strike the average person as a sophisticated practice of cultural communication compared to perhaps paintings and classical music, memes are in fact part of an intricate symbiotic relationship with culture, it both affects and is affected by the values and meanings possessed by the culture. Moreover, this notion is supported by the understanding of internet memes and their spread. The sharing of memes either as a person-to-person communication or broadcast to a number of people, in addition to the participatory nature of encoding new meanings, as well as the transformations memes take as they are passed along, is evidence that ‘culture is ordinary’ is in action, as it points towards the active discourses and changes a culture takes which ultimately leads to new discoveries, conclusions and meanings. Additionally, memeplexes, as informed by Dawkins (1976), further elucidates Williams’s position towards the significance of arts, as in this case, memes as a form of artistic expression perform complicated interplays with other memes, resulting in complex memeplexes of culture. As such, in the case of memes, an ‘ordinary’ culture can be read as a memeplex, consisting of the complex relationships between individual memes.

3. LEARNING NOTHING: EDUCATION AS PRECURSOR TO RACIALISED MEMES

In understanding, specifically, the cultural impacts of racialised memes, I argue that racialised memes are products of pre-existing epistemes towards race in Malaysia, which itself is a by-product of deliberate ethnic stratification in the Malaysian education system. As maintained by Brown (2007), the Malaysian public education system became a political tool of the then-ruling Barisan National regime in advancing dominant Malay ethnic interests. Despite the pretenses of cultivating a unified national identity, and the interest of resolving Malaysian ethnic tensions which arose from political and economic issues – such as the 1969 riots – through the introduction of a national identity, Brown argued that the proposed national identity is rooted in a conception of nationhood which “… rather than transcending ethnic allegiances, is explicitly based on ethnic stratification …” (ibid., 2007, p. 319). Despite its demographic consisting of a wide variety of races, Brown pointed to the positioning of the Malaccan-Malay Sultanate as the basis of nationhood distinctly placed emphasis towards the Malay ethnic group as the dominant foreground in the Malaysian identity, positioning other races as subordinate to the Malay in term of historiography (ibid., 2007: 328). Additionally, Brown added that, the emphasis of unquestioning loyalty to the Sultan as the ruler of Malacca was equated to be a noble virtue and part of ‘state ideals’ for the ideal citizen, and was then restated through pedagogical maneuverings, transformed into “… demands [..] in the form of political loyalty to the BN regime” (ibid., 2007: 328) As such, Brown argued that these conditions in effect encouraged the Malaysian ‘ethnic citizen’ to participate uncritically in Malaysian political life, and abide by the government, positioned to have ‘parental’ authority, unquestioningly (ibid., 2007: 319) As a result, the construction of the Malaysian national identity through education policies had failed to unify Malaysian citizens under a “colourblind” national identity, and as such, I argue Malaysians to retain primary identification with their ethnic origins, with the Malaysian identity only serving as a secondary or even supplementary mode of identification. As such, despite being Malaysians, their primary identification through ethnic origins encourages the “othering” of Malaysians from other backgrounds, as there exists little-to-no sense of belonging beyond ethnic boundaries. This can be seen through the meme as featured in Fig. 3, which features an extremely hyperbolic, yet somewhat literal situation of the “othering”. As the construction of the national identity in the Malaysian education system, in addition to national legal documentation frameworks, mainly focused on the 3 major ethnic groups in Malaysia – which are the Malay, Chinese, and Indian – the various excess identities in Malaysia are lumped into the category of “Lain-Lain”, translated literally as the “Others” (Ravendran, 2021). Despite this meme featuring a doctored Google search response which elicits the sad response of the hyperbolised “Others”, this meme speaks to a legitimate issue in the disenfranchisement of various Malaysian races from the Malaysian cultural conception.

4. BEYOND DICHOTOMIES: CONTESTED CULTURE OF RACIALISED MEMES

Although the ontology of racialised memes in Malaysia reveals a troubling past in ethnic relations, the practical usage of racialised memes does not necessarily carry the same connotations. In problematising the contemporary usage of racialised memes, I employ Raymond Williams’s understanding of the hegemonic and the emergent. The current proliferation of racialised memes can be seen as being framed within the dominant culture of Malay hegemony. According to Williams, hegemony refers to a lived structure of beliefs and understandings (Williams, 1977, p. 110) that is continually replicated, reinforced and reiterated (ibid., 1977, p. 112). Hegemony is replicated through a process of socialisation, which exposes the individual to learning things “ … which all human beings have to learn …” though then tied to specific scope of meanings tied to the hegemonic. As such, through the understanding of the hegemonic alone, the prior meme in Fig. 3 can be regarded as the reinforcement of negative portrayal of the “Lain-lain” category, effectively reiterating the hegemonic position of disenfranchising the ethnic identities other than Malay, Chinese, and Indian.

However, that is not necessarily the case. I argue that racialised memes are far more akin to Raymond Williams’s understanding of the emergent cultural practices, which always originates with the emergence of new classes (ibid., 1977, p. 124), which, in this case, I argue to have been ushered by the shift in communications afforded by the Internet, which expedited speed of data sharing and communications. However, courtesy of its recent emergence, it is often difficult to ascertain the degree by which it opposes or compliments the dominant culture, as the formation of the culture is “… certain to be incomplete.” (ibid., 1977, p. 124). As such, it is nigh impossible to confidently pinpoint and describe the positive or negative nature of racialised memes, as it is still a culture undergoing transformation and negotiation. However, in an attempt to understand the emergent or pre-emergent cultures, Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’ can be applied. Structure of feeling is a discursive activity in defining cultures that have yet to be solidly recognised as a social experience, inextricably tied to the expressions of the individual artist (ibid., 1977, p. 132) As such, in the attempt of identifying the structures and norms of the emergent practice of racialised memes, the meme creator plays an important role in negotiating the meaning, and thus intentions of the racialised meme. As such, a reading through the structure of feeling may inform the negotiation put forth by the meme creator of Fig. 4, as they utilised racial undertones to – rather than maliciously targeting the Malay ethnic group – instead bring light of cultural issues pertinent to the Malay group. This meme is situated in discourses pertaining to the policing of Malay women’s clothing on social media (Chalil, 2019), simultaneously engaging with the discourse on sexual harassment which Malay individuals are complicit in (Ainaa Aiman, 2021). The creator of this meme therefore engages in a positive form of social critique, resulting in a form of resistance against injustice.

5. CONCLUSION

Despite their normative nature and small-scale initial spread, memes offer a formidable lens to understanding culture on a wider societal level. Memes allow for the transmission of cultural ideas, values and objectives of society, thus simultaneously reflecting, and are reflected by, culture at large. Racialised memes, specifically, reflect a reality by which the national identity of Malaysia remains segregated. However, despite the rather unfortunate ontology of racialised memes in Malaysia, its construction as a cultural practice is still incomplete and undergoing negotiation. As such, the meanings behind individual racialised memes should be formed by considering their social context, lexical position, and negotiations from the meme creator.

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