ABSTRACT
The changing identity discourses of race, gender, and language in postcolonial Malaysia form the focus of this chapter, which examines how Hang Li Po—a legendary Chinese princess who was said to have married the Sultan of Melaka in the fifteenth century—has been translated via drama and performance in two contemporary plays produced more than a decade apart: a 1982 Malay-language bangsawan (Malay opera) titled Puteri Li Po (Princess Li Po) by Rahmah Bujang and a 1998 multilingual monodrama titled Hang Li Poh—Melakan Princess by Ann Lee. Revised as a historical figure in Malaysian textbooks, Hang Li Po has been ideologically positioned in ways that bear critical implications for Malaysian Chinese identity and Chinese-Malay relations in the nation space. Drawing on performance translation in the analysis of the dramatic appropriations and revisions of Hang Li Po, this chapter thus considers how both plays critically engage with local and/or global discourses of their time, and what they reveal in terms of the translational politics of identity and representation. In the analysis, the questions of how Malaysia as an idea is imagined and articulated, and what it means to be Malaysian, are also addressed.
