RESEARCH
My dissertation, Indefinite Excisions: Forest management, rubber cultivation, and social hierarchies in Malaysia, rethinks the traditional idea that colonial extraction is a unilateral practice of dispossession. By examining the ethnic politics of timber and rubber in Malaysia, I argue that extraction is an indeterminate practice. To substantiate my argument, I examine the excision, a practice introduced by the British in the 1910s in Malaya as a new extractive method to simultaneously institutionalize the rainforest as a timber plantation and demarcate parts of it for rubber plantation development. The British managed the excision’s complementary ecology of plantations in conjunction with racial hierarchies, confining Orang Asli (forest-dwelling communities) and Chinese in the context of forestry, managing Indian labor and wildlife in the name of rubber productivity, and excluding the Malays (coastal natives of the peninsula) from the extractive economy. Still implemented in Malaysia, excisions produce partially overlapping ecologies of plantations to index different racial coordinates. Through a postcolonial indigeneity-driven affirmative agenda (Bumiputra), Malays became the full beneficiaries of agricultural extraction at the expense of Orang Asli, excluding Indians and Chinese. Based on 24 months of archival work in Malaysia, the United Kingdom, France, and the US, and ethnographic fieldwork with scientists, artists, government officials, loggers, activists, and rubber smallholders in Malaysia, I trace colonial excisions into the present to show their socio-spatial fixes are indefinite, constantly unsettled and reformed. Specifically, my dissertation discusses how postcolonial excisions at once (1) interlace the colonial rubber-timber ecology of plantations through the scientific honing of rubberwood and (2) facilitate strategies for Chinese subversion and Orang Asli resistance through the cultivation of rubber in forest plantations and smallholdings, respectively. As such, in situating the differential forms of dispossession and empowerment articulated through excisions, I show how extractive practices are indeterminate interventions in local ecologies.
My monograph expands my doctoral research to examine the ways in which excisions alter the peninsula’s ecology of more-than-human kinship. Broadening my focus beyond rubber and timber, I investigate how, in conjunction with Cold War politics of development, postcolonial excisions proliferate a Bumiputra tripartite ecology of rubber, timber, and oil palm whose productivity hinges on programs of wildlife conservation and environmental sustainability. I discuss how these more-than-human reconfigurations engendered by these excisions reflect the astute and vital negotiations across seen and unseen realms that communities make through extraction. Ultimately, I argue that extraction is not just indeterminate, but is, in fact, generative.