The Other Malaysia

Taking into consideration the themes and subjects we have discussed thus far that include:

That national identities are discursively constructed and nations are likewise composite assemblies;
And that historical progression is never linear or essentially determinate;
And that identities are negotiated, historically contingent and context-bound;
And that all claims to essentialised identities are political in nature and ideological in [...]

Additional Post-Lecture notes for students of: AS6011 State, Society and Politics in Malaysia (Week 5)
History and Historical Entitlements: Can History provide the basis for political claims in the present?

In summing up this weeks lecture and what we have covered in the first half of the course, let us remind ourselves of the following:
1. The idea [...]

The recent ban on the construction of minarets for mosques in Switzerland - passed by a majority of Swiss citizens mind you - is symptomatic of something that is far more disturbing in Western Europe today. The first decade of this century has witnessed the rise of a new wave of extreme right-wing politicians and [...]

Reading the comments that we received after the posting of the note ‘Migration as Protest’, we were somewhat dismayed at the overall negative tone of so many who wrote in to say that they were despondent and had given up with the Malaysian project itself, to the point where many Malaysians were contemplating of leaving [...]

According to Malaysia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kohilan Pillay, the number of Malaysians who have decided to up their roots and emigrate abroad has almost doubled this year. 3,800 Malaysians have given up their citizenship and simply opted to leave the country of their birth. Furthermore it has been noted that almost half of those who [...]

Additional Post-Lecture notes for students of: AS6011 State, Society and Politics in Malaysia (Week 4)
The British Policy of Divide and Rule: Some comparisons with British India and Burma.
The British policy of ‘divide and rule’ was not exclusive to Malaya alone, nor was it a practice carried out by Britain exclusively. It was a general policy [...]

NOTE: In relation to our discussion on the introduction of race based communal politics in the colonial era and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes that served the needs of the Plural economy based on Racialised Capitalism, see my review of the book by Mona Lohanda, The Chinese and the Dutch in Colonial Java, 1890-1942, below:
NOTE [...]