KOTA SAMARAHAN: It’s about time that the people freed themselves of the colonial shackles and blindfolds to revive the Nusantara heritage and solidarity found within Malaysians and Indonesians.
Founding advisor of Malaysia-Indonesia (MALINDO) Nusantara Research Centre for Migration, Muslim Communities and Peace Studies Associate Professor Dr Reevany Bustami said the people’s paradigms, lenses and epistemology are so colonised that they mostly see themselves, their social reality and the dynamics underlying their world through a colonised mindset, colonised lenses and colonised vocabularies.
“We have mostly forgotten or neglected or marginalised our own Nusantara epistemology.
“We empower the colonial episteme and institutions, and let the colonial powers kill our own indigenous wisdom through colonial epistemicide,” he said during his keynote speech at the two-day long 4th International Conference on Media and Society (iC-MAS2022) Communicating Cultural Heritage: Inclusivity in Changing Landscapes, held here at UNIMAS today (Dec 20).
He said the problems, standards of goodness that the people uphold and the frameworks of solutions sought are also colonised.
“It is far from our indigenous knowledge, our local wisdom and our heritage foresight.
“Therefore, we must revive our Nusantara heritage, ride on the Nusantara waves and awaken our great spirit to accept the good of our heritage that we have taken for granted.
“We have to look at our heritage and see what has been excluded and bring it back again, but not continuing with the one that has been colonised,” he said, adding that the people have to look at their own history and roots to understand themselves better.
