Race,Class and Politics in Peninsular Malaysia: The General Election of 2008

Racial politics have bedevilled peninsular Malaysia since independence in 1957, largely sustained by a ruling coalition of partners sharing power unequally, in a consociational government. The effect of a racialised practice over fifty years is the institutionalisation of the politics of ethnic pluralism, each component driven by its own internal dynamic and cultural logic: for the Chinese it is the politics of economic security, for the Tamils the politics of religion and caste, and for the Malays incipient class antagonisms that are historically rooted in a feudal society. In the general election of 2008, there was an unprecedented swing of votes across the ethnic divide against the ruling government, resulting in the loss of five state governments to an opposition coalition espousing multiculturalism and the loss of the government's two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time. However, we argue that these developments do not signal the beginning of the end of racial politics in peninsular Malaysia. Instead, the opposition has skilfully recoded multiculturalism as social justice and accountability in racial terms, and effectively communicated this to an essentially racialised electorate at a time when Malays, Chinese and Tamils had lost faith in the ruling government's ability to address deep-seated grievances specific to each of these communities.     

9. MOVING FROM,AND BEYOND,INVENTED CATEGORIES: AFTERWORDS

The decentering of narratives is no longer sufficient for bringing the past into sharper focus. As a discipline, we must contend with the continued power imbalance in the production and circulation of histories. It is necessary to give equal valence to histories produced by embracing a range of historical methods, many of which the essays in this forum explore. Doing so expands understandings of what counts as theory in our histories and their obligations in society.     

Beyond ‘Culture’ as an explanation for intimate violence: the politics and possibilities of plural resistance

This article interrogates simplified culturalist explanations of gendered violence, which evoke timeless ‘tradition’ and religiosity to locate violence in racialized places and upon ‘othered’ bodies. I examine structural processes that shape women’s experiences of and vulnerability to intimate violence. My analysis complicates culturalist narratives, but engages critically with culture as one context within which violence is embedded. Drawing on field research within Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India, I discuss the complexities of interwoven experiences of structural, state, and intimate gender violence. I draw attention to how anti-violence organizations working in marginalized communities theorize these complexities, and practices of what I am calling ‘plural resistance,’ which these organizations enact through equally complex responses to such violences. Plural resistance describes community-based strategies that simultaneously reject both gender violence and other forms of systemic violence, such as poverty born of uneven development. Embodied resistance to gender violence provides a critical lens for understanding articulations between regional patriarchies, exclusionary state practices, uneven development, and Islamophobia.