Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity Across Boundaries.

• Author: Mauzy, Diane K.
• Position: Book Review

Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity Across Boundaries. Edited by Timothy P. Barnard. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004. Softcover: 318pp.

This is a book for specialists. It is erudite, dense, and packed with information. This collection of essays is primarily derived from a 1998 conference exploring the concepts of Malay, Malayness, and the "Malay world", including the meaning of "Malay", its derivation and boundaries, and the origins, transformation, and construction of a "Malay ethnicity". The revised papers were subsequently published as a "Symposium on Malay Identity" in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies in 2001. The essays offer perspectives from a number of disciplines--history, anthropology, literature, linguistics--and approaches (postmodern and critical theory particularly) and cover a vast period--from the second century CE to the end of the twentieth century.

Despite what seems to be a focused topic, the papers reveal just how discursive it is. At the end, these terms remain elusive and contested. The editor is to be congratulated for his efforts to tie things together and bring some coherence to the project, particularly in the Preface and by adding opening and closing chapters by Anthony Reid and Anthony Milner. This is a book with many, many trees, as the editor acknowledges. Despite efforts, it remains very difficult to see the forest. At the end, one is left, in the words of one of the writers "feeling disoriented", if not overwhelmed by the immensity of the time and space covered, the many issues raised, and the mass of information.

Timothy P. Barnard and Hendrik M.J. Maier in the Preface state that although investigating the word "Malay" seems "very straightforward" at first glance (p. ix), it is not, and "it seems unlikely that the word will acquire any greater precision in the future".

Reid's opening chapter ("Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a Source of Diverse Modern Identities") adds a welcome overview that touches on the issues discussed in the collection, by tracing the historical development of the core cultural complex centred in the Malay language, and the association with kingship from Srivijaya and Melaka. The colonists, he states, constructed the idea of a Malay race or bangsa, which eventually developed into Malay ethnic nationalism in Malaysia. This contrasts with Indonesia, where nationalism became more territorial than ethnic, and the nationalists took on the more difficult task of "building...