RESEARCH
This project takes the afterlives of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) as a springboard for teasing out the necropolitical affordances of science and technology. Specifically, this project examines how the collaborations between academic institutions, industry stakeholders, and the military in the UK and in Southeast Asia throughout the 1940s and the 1950s around the retooling of synthetic auxin as chemical weapons of war yielded new technologies of productivity. I focus on latex stimulants in particular, which are chemical substances that stimulate increased latex flow through ethylene production. Based on ethnographic research in Malaysia with scientists, plantation owners, and smallholders, and archival research in Malaysia, the UK, and the US, I discuss how latex stimulants, a technology born out of war, operates by regulating death across various scales. I analyze how the application of stimulants manages not only the lifecycle of trees, as latex overproduction shortens rubber’s lifespan, but ultimately feeds war machines, as natural rubber remains a resource integral to large-scale industrial applications. As such, this project situates war and extraction as co-constitutive necropolitical states of matter.