Popular TV fiction: cultural identities and unconscious Malay psyche in Adam & Hawa

• Main Authors: Mohd Muzhafar Idrus, Ruzy Suliza Hashim, Raihanah Mohd Mydin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2016
• Subjects: Malay cultural identities; Popular culture; Media; Sociology; Postcolonial literature; TV fiction
• Online Access: http://ddms.usim.edu.my:80/jspui/handle/123456789/12058
• Institution: Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia

Since the turn of the 21st century, popular Malay TV fiction has been thriving, popular, and critically-acclaimed due to their extensive local, national reach. Drawing more than one million viewers including staggering online reruns, this sheer popularity of some Malay TV fiction has led to the questioning of issues that viewers can relate to. In this paper, we contextualize popular Malay TV within a space of cultural identities, focusing on the analysis TV fiction hit, Adam & Hawa. We highlight potential sites of unconscious Malay psyche in this TV fiction. Specifically, we theorize that although Malay subjects deviate from the designated adat, for instance, through internalizing alcohol dependence and cohabitation, this theory posits that they eventually stream themselves, seemingly coordinating with the notions of adat-Islamic values such as forgiveness and repentance. By reading TV fiction’s narrative exchanges, unconscious Malay psyche implies the existence of how some Malay subjects participate in and become involved with the social and modern spheres, eventually gesturing or indexing conformation to tradition and religious labels. Using the triple lenses of hybridity, alternative modernities, and social imaginary, we wish to highlight that unconscious Malay psyche may continue to reshape and perhaps de-familiarize ourselves about Malay cultural identities.