Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity Across Boundaries (review)

Book Reviews 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 ofMalay, Malayness, and the "Malay world", including the meaning of "Malay", its derivation andboundaries, and the origins, transformation, and construction ofa "Malay ethnicity". The revised papers were subsequently published as a "Symposium on Malay Identity" in the Journal ofSoutheast 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. 323 324Book Reviews Timothy P. Barnard and Hendrik MJ. 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 ofthe 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 a bounded state without a core ethnie" (p. 21). Adrian Vickers (" 'Malay Identity' Modernity, Invented Tradition and Forms of Knowledge") has written a complex chapter which investigates how the geographic separations created by colonialism, particularly the separation of "Malay" and "Javanese", are still accepted as the basic terms for analysis (p. 26). Up until the 19th century, these terms were combined or used interchangeably to define the pasisir or coastal world of Southeast Asia (p. 33). He argues for looking at pasisir scale of forms (p. 54) through the study of literary texts that allows one to "view a more complex and ambiguous 'Malay' identity" (p. 26). He concludes that "Pasisir histories are one variety of counter history, alternative to the European/anti-European histories of colonialism and nationalism" (p. 55). In an interesting essay, Leonard Y. Andaya ("The Search for the 'Origins' of Melayu") investigates the rival claims of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula to being the centre of the Malay world by tracing language derivations (p. 24). He concludes that it is the heritage of southeastern Sumatra and western Borneo that inspired the Melayu of Melaka. From the middle of the 15th century, Melaka's commercial success and literary output made it synonymous with Melayu civilization and consequently Melayu identity was wrenched from Sumatra. With the division ofthe Malay world into Dutch and British spheres, Melayu finally became identified politically and in the popular mind with the peninsula. In a chapter added later to the collection, Heather Sutherland ("The Makassar Malays: Adaptation and Identity, c. 1660-1790") studies the Malay refugee community in the multi-ethnic port of Makassar, based on her close reading of VOC records and archives, among others. The account begins by considering the nature of Makassar's commerce Book Reviews325 and the early history of the Malay community there (from 1561) and then traces its...