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Common ground: Race and the colonial universe in British Malaya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Abstract

This article explores the common bases of knowledge on race among Malay intellectuals and British scholar-officials in British Malaya. It focuses on genealogies of knowledge that not only lead back to Europe, but to contexts in the Malay Archipelago, encompassing both coloniser and colonised as agents of production of colonial knowledge on race. Race was a strategy adopted by Malay intellectuals in a colonial milieu, in line with histories and conditions before and during the period of British control over Malaya. The notion of complicities is explored in studying the interaction between British and Malay intellectuals which produced colonial knowledge on race.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2009

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References

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33 My translation of Za'ba's title is, ‘A short history of Malaya, selected and translated from relevant sections of “Malaya” written by Dr R.O. Winstedt (which was published in 1922)’.

34 Racial ideologies enabled the newspaper Utusan Melayu to extend its rhetoric as far as Ceylon (Milner, Invention of politics in colonial Malaya, p. 100).

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60 Ibid., pp. 34–8, 103–4.

61 Ibid., pp. 90–4.

62Teguran dan jawaban-nya’ in Al-Ikhwan, 16 Nov. 1926, in The real cry of Syed Shaykh al-Hady, with selections of his writings by his son Syed Alwi Al-Hady, ed. Alijah Gordon (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 1999), pp. 189–94.

63 See, for example, the tone of Wilson, Woodrow's speech given in 1918 on self-determination in The human rights reader: Major political writings, essays, speeches, and documents from the bible to the present, ed. Ishay, Micheline R. (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 299304Google Scholar.

64 Roff, Origins of Malay nationalism, p. 150; Miller, Harry, The story of Malaysia (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 167Google Scholar.