RESEARCH
Polychronous Enclosures: Cultivating Competing Futures across Rubber Smallholdings
This project examines the relations between temporality and extraction. In the 1960s, the Malaysian government sought to rewrite the fate of Malays by rectifying their exclusion from the colonial economy of extraction. Through the development of productive enclosures, the government empowered Malays as Bumiputra (lit. sons of the soil), a category of indigeneity that includes Malays and Orang Asli (ancestrally forest-dwelling communities) in a racialized relation of hierarchy. The government reimagined the future(s) of Bumiputras in conjunction with the temporal rhythms of plantations. Through the campaign “Replant or Die,” the government urged Malay smallholders to replant rubber trees on a 25-year cycle to boost productivity and, thus, facilitate a prosperous future. By implication, “Replant or Die” foreclosed Orang Asli futures, as many Bumiputra land development schemes were built through forceful appropriation of their ancestral lands. Yet the (mono-)chronology of Bumiputra enclosures proved erratic: despite laborious efforts to contain the plantation rhythms of life through herbicides and fertilizers, volunteer seedlings——plants that grow from seeds germinating on their own accord——were adamant about their future; along with them, so were Orang Asli. Based on archival and ethnographic research in Malaysia, I discuss the serendipitous——and timely——relation between volunteer seedlings and Orang Asli villagers which, in doing multiple things at once, helps unpack extractive ecologies of enclosure. I show how polychronicity is a useful analytic for capturing the ways in which communities at once set and warp the boundaries of enclosures in racial capitalism.