Imaginary Boundaries: Race and Inter-ethnic Intimacy in British Malaya, 1900–1960

Abstract

“Imaginary Boundaries” examines how categories of difference were made and remade in colonial Malaya. It asks: How did colonial subjects negotiate access to resources and rights through family and intimacy in a society defined by rigid racial boundaries? Focusing on Malaya’s transition from colony to nation-state and situating it within Indian Ocean and trans-Asian circuits, I argue that family and kinship were central arenas for reconfiguring colonial categories of race and subjecthood. Through narratives of adoption, cohabitation, and marriage across racial and national lines, I demonstrate how individuals contested state classification systems to pursue landownership, inheritance, mobility, and belonging. By tracing these negotiations from the turn of the century through the postwar years and into independence—when race, citizenship, and national belonging hardened into an institutional framework that continues to shape Malaysian and Singaporean life today—the project speaks to broader questions in studies of empire, classification, and legal pluralism. To account for Malaya’s plurality of languages and cultures, I draw on court transcripts, petitions, government records, adoption files, social welfare reports, newspapers, films, novels, travelogues, and oral histories in Malay, Chinese (Mandarin), Indonesian, Bengali, and English. “Imaginary Boundaries” bridges two bodies of scholarship rarely in conversation: the history of racial–legal classification and the history of gender, family, and intimacy in South and Southeast Asia. While scholars have examined classification as a tool of governance and family or intimacy as a site of moral regulation, few have explored how these domains intersected in everyday practice. By focusing on family ties, I show how ordinary people invoked their interpersonal relationships to contest and reconfigure state-imposed boundaries. Building on Indian Ocean historiography that emphasizes circulation and mobility, the project pivots from movement to settlement, asking how migrants sought to claim belonging and how states adjudicated those claims. By tracing how intimacy functioned as a pathway to rights, “Imaginary Boundaries” recasts the making of race and citizenship in Malaysia and Singapore as inextricably tied to the history of family and domestic life, offering a Southeast Asian perspective on classification and its persistence beyond empire.