ABSTRACT
The transnational media migrations into, out of, and within contemporary Asia prove that we can no more talk about one-way traffic of media from the West to Asia. Alongside conversations about mediated cultural exchange and globalization, the production and dissemination of “Islamic” as well as “Islamist” media have accelerated worldwide. 1 These cultural flows have occurred within what some have (problematically) termed “Muslim Asia.” 2 The influx of Western screen media into “Muslim Asia,” and the supposed resistance in the form of “national” art cinemas against such flows, marked the intersection of media, culture, and religion in Asia in the early 1990s. Scholars have argued that globalization of markets and media (including the Islamic/Islamist ones) transformed understandings of nation and culture and led the national media platforms to become sites for the intercourse of the local and the global. With/in such intercourse, this chapter attempts to understand the roles of the national film industries based in two major nation-spaces of so-called “Muslim” Asia. I examine the workings of the Bangladeshi and Malaysian art cinemas: how do these nationally defined but transnational/regional, cultural institutions interact with Islam and Muslim identity in nation-spaces where Muslims are the majority (above 80% in Bangladesh and around 60% in Malaysia)?
