Bad and Strange Feelings: The Everyday, Affective Colonial Trauma of Race and Racialisation in My Malaysian Chinese Family

Abstract

The legacy of British Colonisation continues to shape many aspects of contemporary Malaysian life. One important legacy of British Colonisation was a finite concept of racial difference. In Colonial Malaya, these colonial racial logics determined that the Native Malays, Chinese, and Indians who populated Malaya were racially distinct and incapable of integrating with one another. Today, race remains the most significant determinant in shaping Malaysian politics, economics, and everyday life. Significant postcolonial work has examined the impact of the colonial legacy on the everyday lives of postcolonial subjects. Whilst there is a growing amount of literature that explores the racialised lives of the Malaysian Chinese, who make up a significant proportion of Malaysia’s population, little has considered what this colonial legacy may intimately feel like. This thesis uses trauma as a framework to explore how the legacy of racial logics can continue to shape the affective, felt dimensions of Malaysian Chinese life. The research focuses on the researcher’s own Malaysian Chinese family. It employs ethnographic and interviewing methods to examine how the colonial trauma of race and racialisation shapes everyday feelings in Malaysian Chinese life. In doing so, the thesis examines bad feelings (resignation, wistfulness, and anger) and strange feelings (ambivalent, affective atmospheres) experienced by Malaysian Chinese in Malaysia. The thesis explores the geo-historic, colonial contexts that evoke these feelings, and in so doing, argues that these bad and strange feelings can be understood as the manifestation of the colonial trauma of race and racialisation. Throughout the thesis, these bad and strange feelings are affectively evoked through data-transcript poetry and narrative storytelling. The thesis stays with the intimacy of the author’s family and their experiences. It aims to provide an intimate and affective account of contemporary postcolonialisms.