Settler Colonial Studies

Malaysia: A Settler Colonial State?

What might settler colonialism look like within the context of Southeast Asia?

This special issue of Settler Colonial Studies is interested in pushing the parameters of settler colonial scholarship beyond Anglo-America and the Anglo-Pacific. Our focus is on the Southeast Asian state of Malaysia. Prior scholarship has analysed the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples (Orang Asal) in Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo (Sabah and Sarawak) by a state and historical context premised on Malay-Muslim hegemony. The rubric of ‘Malayness’ has been leveraged by the aristocracy, colonial actors, intellectuals, social movements and populist politics to justify the expansion of the Malaysian state’s frontiers both cartographically and culturally. Orang Asal territories and cultural sovereignty thus become arenas in which the Malaysian state encroaches and is resisted. Drawing from this, we are interested in exploring how settler colonialism might operate within the context of postcolonial Malaysia, both as a historical and ongoing process.

We invite original submissions that seek to explore this dynamic through the lens of theories pertaining to settler colonialism. Questions that might be addressed include:

• What were and continue to be the processes of state-making in Malaysia, and how might these be situated within a settler colonial framework?
• How do ethno-religious dynamics within the Malaysian state shape the processes of settler colonialism?
• How is ‘indigeneity’ conceptualised and contested within Malaysia? One can refer to the framework of the bumiputra for an example.
• How do the Indigenous Peoples resist settler colonialism in Malaysia?
• How has settler colonialism altered the ecology of Malaysia?
• How did the transition from colonialism under the British to the formation of the postcolonial Malaysian state shape the nature of settler colonialism in a Malaysian context?
• What are the colonial or even precolonial legacies that give rise to contemporary dynamics?