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Descending into foreignness: Datuk Fatimah and the home of the pendatang

ABSTRACT In the worship of keramats amongst the Chinese community of Malaysia, Datuk Fatimah bears some unique characteristics: she is identifiable as a female figure who wears the hijab and conforms to the ideals of a pious Muslim woman, even as she is invested with a crown that signifies her temporal sovereignty. This essay frames the history of the architecture of the temple devoted to her and the surrounding village in relation to a 1958 essay on ‘Odd Houses’ by German architecture historian Julius Posener, the founder of the first architecture programme in Kuala Lumpur. ‘Odd Houses’ offers a mode of seeing that embraces the permutative and playful idioms of modernism. Rather than seeing modernity as a set of predetermined characteristics and conditions, the essay explores the modern as a practice of elective affinity, through which we may explore the heterochrony of migration and its art history. The accounting of time is premised on the mytho-poetic language of ritual possession, which offers a reading of temple as a historical record. This record communicates a relayed cultural bond between two working class migrant communities (Chinese and Javanese) across the twentieth century.