The Malayan Dilemma: Race, Power and State Formation in Malaya

Abstract

Race is an expression of power. The Malayan Dilemma speaks to a dilemma that has been plaguing contemporary Malaysia: the salient yet problematic notion of race. Specifically, this dissertation unravels the history behind the making and transformation of the country’s three major race categories – Malay, Chinese, and Indian – as the legacy of a series of power struggles dating back to the British and Japanese colonial eras. This study departs from prior studies that have not systematically scrutinised race as a dynamic and historically contingent social category. Instead, by adapting the concepts of racial formation and using a historical institutional lens, it argues that race is an expression of power shaped by historical interactions among state and sub-state actors at multiple levels. Colonial encounters among these actors fostered the ascendancy of institutions that assigned meanings to race categories, governing individuals’ access to power and resources. Continual investment in these institutions had produced colonial subjects who internalised the conditions of race, with far-reaching implications for the shaping of statehood and society in Malaya (as the country was called before 1963). The failure to undo the effects of racialisation at critical junctures during the colonial eras reinforced the salience of the three race categories examined here, charging race with a new lease of life in defining the postcolonial state. Although this study focuses only on Malaya, it offers a framework that is instructive not only for future studies of race and state formation, but also for interrogating other postcolonial states that have inherited the colonial legacy of racialisation.