The meaning of race in Malaysia: Colonial, post-colonial and possible new conjunctures

Abstract

New transitions -and tensions -in Malaysian society have created a much-needed space for critical reflection on the meaning of race. They have also provided the impetus to rethink the dominant paradigm shaping Malaysian studies. This article begins this discussion by situating race within three frameworks that give it meaning -state, academic and people-centred discourse from the nation's cultural margins. These discourses are then viewed in terms of conjunctures or temporal formations. The statedriven paradigm of pluralism, as manifested in the separate and separable 'Malay'/ 'Chinese'/'Indian'/ 'Others' (MCIO) racial categorizations, has its origins in British colonialism. It is deeply embedded in policies and practices and also integrated into formal structures and institutions. Although these categories of race and naming have begun to lose much of their salience on the ground, they continue to be mobilized by the state and other hegemonic non-state actors as a primary marker of difference and differentiation between groups. Equally disconcerting is the fact that even academic discourse is also largely conducted within the epistemological and ontological bases of colonialist knowledge production. Since state and other non-state actors who benefit from dominant paradigms have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining them, and tend to resist reform, this article argues that it is imperative that the attempt to think critically about race is done at, from, and through the site of conceptual disjuncture between 'how we are represented' and 'how we might represent ourselves'. This rupture must be seen as a seminal point of departure for knowledge construction. The article concludes with a consideration of the role of the researcher in its critical trajectory to track 'where we are, how we got here and where we can go from here'. Ethnicities 0(0) 1-28 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Regional identity formation in Malaysia: Primacy of the political center and its essentialized ethnic identities

“…The arrival of colonial powers introduced essentialized conceptions of race that were layered on top of these nascent regional identities. The census, in tandem with reinforcing ethnic policies that responded to those essentialized census categories, eventually produced the MCIO (Malay/Chinese/Indian/Other) scheme that continues to structure Malaysian politics and society in fundamental ways, including through electoral behavior (Gabriel, 2015; Pepinsky, 2015).…”

“…The dominance of Malaysian politics by ethnic parties corresponding to the MCIO distinctions served to institutionalize those divisions, which faced few serious challenges prior to the reformasi movement of the late 1990s (Weiss, 1999). This is particularly the case because the MCIO scheme has shown significant instrumental value for the UMNO‐led ruling coalition as a way to mobilize political support (Gabriel, 2015). It is, in many respects, a central pillar of UMNO’s legitimacy and an intrinsic part of UMNO’s nation‐building project, which we examine in the next section.…”

Multiracial in Malaysia: Categories, Classification, and Campur in Contemporary Everyday Life

“…Yet Malaysians struggle with achieving this because the Bumiputera policy and its resultant effects on the non-Malay population puts race relations in a precarious position. Enforcing affirmative action in the interest of Malays has institutionalized racial boundaries between Malays and non-Malays (Gabriel 2015). The New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced in 1971 aimed to address income inequalities regardless of race and eliminate the identification of occupation of race (Fee and Appudurai 2011).…”

The Endurance and Contestations of Colonial Constructions of Race Among Malaysians and Singaporeans

“…Indeed, there is a rich tradition of psychological studies from Asia, Africa and Latin America that inform our understanding of the human condition and that cannot be ignored (Sinha, 1981; Paranjpe et al, 1988). There have been many, more recent, contributions to the study of racial identities from South Africa (Bowker and Star, 2000), Malaysia (Gabriel, 2015), and Brazil (Bianchi et al, 2002), for example, which have used and extended Western research and theories on racial identities. To this end, there are many insights to be gleaned from directing our focus to racial identity constructions in a comparative study among Malaysians and Singaporeans.…”

“…From a political perspective, little has changed since independence from colonial rule with regards to the importance of the racial categories as well as the content of these categories in Singapore (see Reddy, 2016, for an elaboration). Race has retained its role as the prime apparatus of administration and control, with race-based political parties in Malaysia deriving their origins and ideologies from post-colonial context (Gabriel, 2015). Yet perhaps what is less studied, within the contexts of Malaysia and Singapore, is whether these colonial constructions of race persist in contemporary construction of racial identities given that the colonial racial categories remain in formal racial categorisation today.…”