Anxious Enactments: Postcolonial Anxieties and the Performance of Territorialization

Abstract

This paper examines the specific configurations that territorialization took in the colonial and post-colonial Malaysian state within the context of the crisis of authority that accompanies violent conflicts. I trace the post-colonial Malaysian state's attempt to legitimate itself when its elites supported the British in the counterinsurgency campaign, known as the Emergency, against the forest-based Malayan Communist Party who fought for independence after WWII. Territorializing Malaysia required both physical reconfiguration and imaginative recuperation of the landscape. The success of the counterinsurgency rested on two ambitious spatial policies: the New Villages and the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) agricultural scheme. I explore how the two policies constructed moral “citizenscapes” for the performance of national identity. The New Villages comprised a punitive landscape designed to contain 20% of the population through curfews and a geometric architecture rendering them visible to, and manageable by, the state. But an equally urgent task of the reterritorialization project for the Malaysian post-colonial government was the creation of a positive moral scopic politics and an essentialized national space inhabited by loyal subject-citizens in place of the anarchic rainforest and its insurgent population. The FELDA schemes were conceived as theatrical stages for performing national identity as embodied in the male bumiputera settler. My paper explores how state power is legitimized through a performance of its subjects and citizens within punitive and affirmative landscapes that construct a postcolonial nature.