Authorizing the Malaysian Rainforest: Configuring Space,Contesting Claims and Conquering Imaginaries

Abstract

The heart of a Malayan city ..., is always a small clearing wrested from the jungle and, too easily, turns jungle again.¹

It is the jungle; the jungle which none can escape, the jungle which reaches to the back of every compound, to the back of every mind; the jungle which blots out the sun over four-fifths of Malaya's 50,850 square miles. Harsh and elemental, implacable to all who dare trifle with its suffocating heat or hissing rains, the jungle alone has remained untamed and unchanged.²