Becoming Chinese in the Malay world: colonialism, migration and history in Singapore

ABSTRACT

This article raises a neglected discussion on the intertwined connections between Chinese migration and European imperial formations in the Malay world using Singapore as a focal point. Working from the perspective of critical historiography in contemporary Singapore, the article highlights limitations in current approaches using concepts such as “Chinese migration” and “Chinese diaspora.” I suggest using “the Malay world” to surface the specificity of the coloniality of migratory Chineseness in this region on account of the transethnic and fluid character of the Malay world. Using the Malay world as method and conceptual scaffolding helps to contextualise Chinese migration to Singapore within Indigenous patterns of movement, settlement and identity formation in a region disrupted and reorganised with European imperial formations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unravelling nationalistic framing of masculine and patriarchal histories of diasporic Chineseness, this approach critiques efforts in myth-making about Chineseness and Singaporean exceptionalism in this region.

KEYWORDS:

• Malay world
• national history
• Singaporean exceptionalism
• mobility
• Chinese migration
• diaspora

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 Mbembe (2021, 72) writes that “colonial prose” is “the mental setup, representations, and symbolic forms that served as the infrastructure of the imperial project.”

2 One recent effort interested in re-working the scholarship on settler colonialism using Singapore’s history albeit only for the immediate years after 1819 is Knapman 2021.

3 “Methodological statism” is a position that naturalises rather than historises the state. Approaches premised on methodological statism set “the state” against “society” and do not historicise “how, when and why the borders of malleable states came to be congealed” or explain what “events and processes produce borders as containing fixed territories and populations.” (Mongia 2018, 5).

4 Slippage between understanding Chineseness as a category of practice and an analytical category is a general problem in the study of identities as discussed by Brubaker and Cooper (2000).

5 My geographical understanding of the Malay world, also known locally as “Nusantara,” is taken from Anthony Reid (2015, 241).

6 Leonard and Barbara Andaya have done exemplary work illustrating this interethnic dependency. See also Wu ([2003] 2010).

7 For example, Wei Yuan on the Nanyang in Haiguo Tuzhi.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siew-Min Sai

Siew-Min Sai is a Taiwan-based Singaporean historian who researches the histories of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia with a focus on imperial formation in Southeast Asia, the cultural politics of colonialism and nationalism, language, race and Chineseness.