This article examines the ambivalent relationship between members of the Portuguese-Melakan Kristang minority and the state from the 1940s to the present day through the lens of ethnic politics. It reveals how ambivalent imaginaries of the future have shaped the politics of community members and what strategies they have used to assert their place. Moreover, it analyses how partly contradictory, partly converging imaginaries of the future of the Melaka coastline fuelled the failure of the Melaka Gateway land reclamation project. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in Melaka in 2018 and 2019, it focuses on the Melaka Gateway, a large-scale land reclamation project located in the Melaka Straits where three man-made islands and one natural island with high-rise buildings, a cruise terminal and a deep sea port have been planned.
This article makes the case for environmental protest aesthetics as part of a decolonial worlding that encompasses a variety of relational performative acts through which creative resistance to colonialism, capitalism, and resource exploitation is staged. These acts are understood as relational because in their graphics, image-text events in social media, and in their appearances at street protests, they refer to a system that they seek to subvert. The case studies drawn on are Fridays for Future, Klima Action Malaysia and the kristang community in Melaka. Inspired by research on worlding, the aesthetics of protest and performative acts these case studies are examined as manifestations of different facets of decolonial worlding, with a particular focus on the production and dissemination of visual material in the context of environmental protest.
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