Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His recent books include The Eurasian Core and its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016).

310 posts

George Town – From city to municipality to culture centre

7 min read

George Town thus had the honour of becoming Malaya’s first city. It remained the country’s only city until 1972, when KL, on being separated from Se...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The Unity Fetish

10 min read

Boy in Kelantan. Collective identities are a demand from without, while individual identity is a personally lived experience.The collective individualMa...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Marina Mahathir: Malaysia is my colour movie

11 min read

Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir is the keynote speaker at the fifth George Town Literary Festival (GTLF), which takes place on November 27-29 . On a daily basis, M...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The Penan’s Lament: “The Forest is Our Skin”

5 min read

Rainforest Hero: The Life and Death of Bruno Manser, by Ruedi Suter, SIRD (Petaling Jaya, Malaysia) & Bergli (Basel, Switzerland), 2015. Translated by Ali...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Mahathir: “People Must Be Able to Hold Their Heads Up.”

11 min read

Ooi Kee Beng: Tun, your generation fascinates me. You are of the nation-building generation who dared to imagine that it would not only change the world, but co...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Creating a City of Culture Costs – But We Should Happily Pay

2 min read

Artists – be they painters or sculptors, musicians or even authors – need sponsors. They need patrons. In our commercial age, there is of course t...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Account of an Early Transit in Penang

10 min read

The following text is from a report written and submitted in 1796 by Captain Walter Caulfield Lennon. It is about his impressions of “Pulo Penang&...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Dialogue with a KL cabbie

4 min read

I paid at the counter for a taxi at KLIA2 a few weeks ago to take me to Bandar Sunway. My cabbie was an elderly Malay man who liked quoting Shakespeare. (He was...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

A Convincing Case for Farquhar

7 min read

The present always becomes the past. And the past in turn is something that slowly settles, obscuring as often as it educates; and in time it becomes hardened t...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The Art of Dismantling Cultural Pluralism

5 min read

Malaysia is a special place for its natural geography and its human history, but most importantly of all, because of its demographic complexity.The peninsula...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The Diminishing of Humans through Identity Politics

3 min read

Who am I?A simple question to ask oneself, and yet, no simple answer suggests itself. As long as the issue is about the singular person, it appears to be but...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Enough With Penang Food Already! What About the Drinks?

3 min read

Yes, Penang has amazing food, be it fusion or hybrid, street or mall, traditional or accidental. And yes, it has amazing desserts too, like the Penang Road te...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng