Remembering the ‘Soul of the Chinese Malaysian’: Quasi-Religious Memory Work and Identity Transformation of the Post-Memory Generation in Postcolonial Malaysia

This article explores how minority movements in postcolonial Malaysia utilize quasi-religious memory work, situated on the frontier between the secular and the sacred, to resist exclusive ethno-religious nationalism. Using the Lim Lian Geok Memorial Museum in Kuala Lumpur as a case study, it analyzes how the Chinese Malaysian community deploys traditional ancestor worship and modernized mnemonic practices to commemorate a deceased leader of the Chinese education movement. Moving beyond rational-actor theoretical models and drawing on the analytic concept of "quasi-religion," this article illustrates the alternative agency of marginalized racial groups under authoritarian state repression. On one hand, activists transform the memory of the dead into a sacralized repertoire of resistance; on the other hand, they construct the venerated gravesite and memorial museum into entangled religious-secular ritual spaces to generate inter-generationally shared collective memory and a spirit of resistance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2024, interviews with 50 activists across different generations, and an analysis of historical archives and newspaper discourse, this article first traces the sacralization of Lim Lian Geok. Initially, activists sacralized him as the “soul of the Malaysian Chinese,” but as political contexts shifted, he was strategically reimagined as the “father of mother tongue education.” Subsequently, activists invented the 'Chinese Education Festival' on the anniversary of Lim's death, establishing it as a secular ritual for regenerating symbolic resistance. Simultaneously, activists transformed the Lim Lian Geok Memorial Museum into a site of secular pilgrimage, shaping it into both a cultural laboratory for collective resistance and a ritual space for the identity transformation of the post-memory generation. This article further elaborates on the theoretical implications of this postcolonial Southeast Asian case study by discussing how entangled forms of resistance within authoritarian regimes blur the religious-secular boundary.