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What can a late-Soviet parody speak of critique and resistance? What kinds of connective threads may it present to the Malay vernacular?
As a parodic style, Stiob demands its practitioner to take an ironic aesthetic that is markedly different from sarcasm, cynicism or derision. The ‘Stiobic act’ demands over-identification with the object of critique, obfuscating determinations of the sincerity to ridicule the act.
In this monologue, Sha Sharif shared her research on this late and post-Soviet parody style, and its attendant concepts of overidentification, ambivalence, polyphonic heteroglossia, tonality, banality, kitsch, poshlost and multilectic analysis. A brief survey of Stiob elsewhere, elsewhen will be also be taken, tracing how Stiob can be mobilised as a form of portable analytics, where knowledge is assumed to always be in transit.
Sha also shared her evolving thoughts on Falsahfaking, a rhizomatic offshoot of Stiob as a speculative-comparative-revisionist anthropology of semiotics, affect and resistance in the Malay vernacular by drawing on the literary work of Wazir Jahan Karim, Salleh ben Joned, and on traditions of Boria, Bangsawan and Malay humour magazines. The project parses and reads against the colonial constructions of the ‘indolent native’ and hopes to generate an evasive emotion of culture containing potentiality for resistance and dissidence.