African international students in Klang Valley: colonial legacies, postcolonial racialization, and sub-citizenship

Abstract

This article examines the experiences of African international students attending universities around the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. I draw upon participant-observations, interviews, and discussions with international students from several African nations and Malaysian citizens of various ethnicities. Malaysian educational programs are actively marketed in Africa, where many students and their families are motivated to pursue an affordable English-language education in an Asian nation. However, African students face an unfriendly and racist reception in the greater Klang Valley area. Persisting colonial legacies of white supremacy, global flows of negative images of Blacks, and newly emergent meta-cultural circulation of representations of Africans-cum-‘Nig(g)erians’ as predatory males shape their experiences of exclusion from cosmopolitan citizenship. I argue that African international students are cast into a low grade of cultural citizenship that cuts across zones of graduated sovereignty. African students adapt to this urban context, perform acts of citizenship, and attempt to foster cosmopolitan relations among themselves and in the broader society. Moments of critical cosmopolitanism from Malaysians are rare and need to be expanded.

Keywords::

• international students
• racialization of Africans
• acts of citizenship
• critical cosmopolitanism

Acknowledgments

I thank the Wenner Gren Foundation for funding my travel to participate in the workshop ‘Ethnoscapes of a New Cosmopolitan Malaysia’ in Kuala Lumpur, 7–9 June 2012.

Notes

^1. By ‘race’ and ‘racial’ I am referring to social and cultural constructions of biological/cultural difference rather than scientific biological categories and natural divisions.

^2. I use pseudonyms for all of my African and Malaysian interlocutors in this article.

^3. According to Pilling, Tiwi indigenous people of Australia did not resent the terms ‘Blacks’ and ‘Blackies,’ and in the 1950s Tiwi Mission schoolgirls used the latter term for themselves (Hart, Pilling, and Goodale 2001, 112).