Anti-colonial raced capitalism in Malaysia: Contested logics, gendered repertoires

In this short video extract, the author discusses the key arguments from their new Review of International Studies article - Anti-colonial raced capitalism in Malaysia: Contested logics, gendered repertoires

Christopher Choong Weng Wai was the 2023 winner of the BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group Early-Career Researcher Paper Prize and this article stems from his winning paper.

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000548

This particular article is open access, however BISA members receive access to all articles in RIS (and our other journal European Journal of International Security) as a benefit of membership. To gain access, log in to your BISA account and scroll down to the 'Membership benefits' section. If you're not yet a member join today.

Abstract

This paper offers a non-Eurocentric account of raced capitalism in Malaysia, articulated as a developmental state project that has navigated the contested racial logics of British colonialism and Japanese imperialism. By historicising Malaysia’s experience, I provide a reading of the Malaysian developmental state as a project that has taken the form of anti-colonial raced capitalism. This is not meant to valorise raced capitalism as anti-colonial, but to suggest that decolonisation must also confront hegemonic elements engraved on the anti-colonial register of nationalised raced capitalism. In bringing a feminist critique to anti-colonial projects that leave capitalist relations uncontested, the paper makes three contributions. First, it recentres race and colonialism in its analysis of the developmental state, offering anti-colonial raced capitalism as a language that speaks to similar projects that enable, legitimise, and obscure new forms of racial/gender domination with counter-hegemonic frames. Second, it brings back politics to anti-colonialism, reestablishing it as a political space with competing visions, imaginations, and agendas, shaped by the geopolitics of empires. Third, it features gender, social reproduction, and the household as key sites to ground the politics of anti-colonialism, enacting the scaffolding for gendered understandings of raced capitalist development on the periphery of the global economy.

Photo from The National Archives UK | Flickr: CO 1069-493-35