This paper considers the abolition of the mui tsai (young female bondservants) as it unfolded in British Malaya, and challenges the overemphasis on Hong Kong as the primary focus of mui tsai scholarship. While the mui tsai system was defended as a time-honoured Chinese tradition, this paper uses new material to show that trans-racial considerations figured prominently in mui tsai abolition in Malaya, particularly in helping to recast it as a wider problem of child welfare. It is argued that this neglected aspect of mui tsai abolition only comes clearly to light in the Malayan case; for only in the intensely multi-racial conditions of peninsular Malaya could the question be asked: ‘Do you own non-Chinese mui tsai?’
This paper recovers the largely forgotten Asia-Pacific Peace Conference which took place in Beijing in October 1952, and elaborates what has been lost in its forgetting. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the diplomatic 'summitry' of Bandung and non-alignment, it insists on reading back into diplomatic histories the emotive and affective dimensions of Third World internationalism in the 1950s, and for the expansion of our idea of the political to encompass them. Turning to peace expressions in Southeast Asia, it argues not only for the inadequacy of Cold War labels like 'communist' and 'front' to understanding these mobilities, but also that we cannot understand the broad popular appeal of the 'Bandung spirit' and later Afro-Asianisms without attempting to take account of the realms of affect and emotion in underpinning and driving them to expression in the contested international spaces of the early Cold War.
Taming Babel sheds new light on the role of language in the making of modern postcolonial Asian nations. Focusing on one of the most linguistically diverse territories in the British Empire, Rachel Leow explores the profound anxieties generated by a century of struggles to govern the polyglot subjects of British Malaya and postcolonial Malaysia. The book ranges across a series of key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which British and Asian actors wrought quiet battles in the realm of language: in textbooks and language classrooms; in dictionaries, grammars and orthographies; in propaganda and psychological warfare; and in the very planning of language itself. Every attempt to tame Chinese and Malay languages resulted in failures of translation, competence, and governance, exposing both the deep fragility of a monoglot state in polyglot milieux, and the essential untameable nature of languages in motion.
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