2 - Race and Its Competing Paradigms: A Historical Review

Summary

Can Malaysian society and politics ever move beyond a race-based paradigm? The need to do so has been stressed by many of those who are working to move Malaysia to a new developmental stage — but, as the Introduction to this book points out, the potency of this paradigm should not be underestimated. How then has the race paradigm become embedded, and in what ways has it been contested and defended? Is it possible to conceptualize Malaysians in terms other than “Malay”, “Chinese” and “Indian” (with allusions to a list of further indigenous groupings)? This last question is often asked. Some analysts have begun to envisage a national “transethnic solidarity” (Loh 2010, p. 11; Mandal 2004, p. 49), a “growing feeling of multi-racialism” (Gomez 2004, p. 21), a move from a “plural to a multiethnic society or nation” (Ong 2009, p. 478), a “nation of equal citizens” (Ong 2009, p. 478), a more “inclusive citizenship” (Hefner 2001, pp. 45, 48), an emerging “language of inclusion and civility” (Abdul Rahman 2001, pp. 72, 81), and a greater stress on “cosmopolitanism” (Yao 2003). In the past, there have been attempts to imagine a “Malayan” citizenship, a “Malayan Union”, a multiethnic identity under a “Melayu” label, a “Malaysian Malaysia”, a “Bangsa Malaysia” (a Malaysian “race” or “nation”) — and in recent years the federal government constantly invoked the idea of a “1Malaysia”.

The formulation or countering of these concepts has of course been shaped by specific economic or political circumstances — the aftermath of the Japanese Occupation, the Communist Insurgency, the 1969 race riots, dramatic downturns in the economy, and so forth. Insisting that ideas and the way they are debated are significant and deserving of analysis in their own right is not to deny their context. The issue is one of focus, and our concern is to examine the manner in which the race paradigm came into being, and then a number of the various attempts that have been made to replace it. To recover both the history of the race paradigm and the range of other conceptualizations operating or advocated in the past makes sense right now — not only for historical purposes, but because of the contribution it could make to the practical deliberations at present taking place in Malaysia.