Research
My dissertation, Indefinite Excisions: Forest management, rubber cultivation, and social hierarchies in Malaysia, rethinks the conventional idea that colonial extraction operates as a unilateral practice of dispossession through the notion of extractive formation. I define extractive formations as the shifting articulations of ecology, politics, epistemology, and temporality emerging from within extractive spaces. 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 and the United Kingdom, and ethnographic fieldwork with scientists, artists, and Orang Asli communities in Malaysia, I trace colonial excisions into the present to show how they animate differential extractive formations that at once strengthen and challenge colonial logics of extraction. Specifically, I show how postcolonial scientists used science to shift the peninsula’s geography of extraction in the name of Bumiputra empowerment, eventually reconfiguring rubber from a latex to a timber crop and engendering new other-than-human necropolitical socialities such as rogue elephants and angry spirits. I discuss how Orang Asli challenge Bumiputra indigeneity by cultivating rubber as analogic kin, making radical claims to futurity through the plantation’s materiality. Similarly, I explore how mixed-race artists adopt rubber as anti-colonial kin to transform rubber plantations into forests through revised aesthetics. By examining how extractive formations encapsulate differential politics of dispossession and resistance, I show how extraction operates as a generative intervention that enables plural notions of socio-environmental justice. My doctoral research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
My next project, Climate Dependencies, investigates the interrelations the US petrochemical complex and postcolonial monocrop plantations by examining the co-dependence between synthetic rubber (artificial elastomers, petroleum byproduct) and natural rubber (Lat. Hevea Brasiliensis). This project takes as a starting point the most severe disease outbreak across the Asian rubber belt first detected in 2017 in Indonesia, threading through knotty webs of causality: scientists claim the disease is caused by an endophyte-turned-pathogen due to climate change and Hevea Brasiliensis’ weak genetic stock because of colonial transplantation; yet scientific claims of disease causality both clash and converge with those of smallholders and economists, who claim the disease is caused by political negligence and synthetic rubber-based neocolonialism, respectively. Based on preliminary findings in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, I argue that these clashes and convergences reveal a multispecies politics of dependency. Based on community-engaged research with scientists, economists, and smallholders in South and Southeast Asia, as well as the United States, I will explore the interrelations between the US production of synthetic rubber, transnational efforts of natural rubber genetic improvement, price-controlling interventions, and natural rubber disease outbreaks to show how dependency is not always a negative relation, but rather a necessary one for overcoming the contemporary ecological crisis.
This project examines the ecological implications in postcolonial settings of the biologically centered notion of the human conceptualized through biochemistry. This project builds on archival research I discuss in a paper currently under review with Medical Anthropological Quarterly, where I show how the standardization of human nutritional health in the 1930s unfolded in British Malaya as a racialized metabolic drift (RMD). Specifically, RMD rendered humans as nutritionally and culturally dysfunctional and, through livestock breeding, soil fertilization and mixed farming, reworked local human-nonhuman assemblages as metabolic relations attuned to racial capitalism.
My goal is to understand how human nutritional health defined across various political and scientific scales radically alters local ecologies in ways that exacerbate uneven exposures to harm across racial lines and climate change. I will also examine the ways in which people have withstood these ecological transformations. In conjunction with this research, I will collaborate with biological anthropologists to critically unpack the role of anthropology in reproducing liberal humanist indexes of both cultural and biological health rooted in racialized extraction.
This project takes the Malayan Emergency as a starting point to investigate the employment of plantation technologies of productivity as chemical weapons of war. In 1948, the British Armed Forces seized control of the Serdang Agricultural Experiment Station and formalized its collaboration with the Rubber Research Institute over trials with herbicides. For almost a decade, the War Committee experimented with plant growth hormones——more commonly known as rainbow agents such as 2,4-D & 2,4-T——in efforts to consolidate efforts for crop destruction as a war strategy. With limited success, the British employed both ground and aerial spraying techniques on guerilla shelter and foodstuffs cultivation plots in rainforest to test the efficiency of herbicides as weapons of war. Yet the army’s experiments with chemical agents were neither exceptional nor unilateral: while first used in combat during the Malayan Emergency, the prospect of chemical agents as weapons of war had been the subject of collaboration between scientists and army personnel across the US and UK since the early 1920a, and were later deployed extensively in the Vietnam war. Moreover, various concentration of synthetic auxin (plant growth hormone) was widely used as herbicides and arboricides in agricultural cultivation and forestry to boost crop productivity and in the rubber industry to facilitate replanting efforts. In exchange, the army’s detailed scientific data on the effectiveness of herbicides supplemented ongoing agricultural and industrial trials. This project investigates the multilateral scientific exchanges across extractive and military industries in Malaya, and beyond, to situate war and extraction as mutually constitutive states of matter.
My second book project,Plastic Utopias: Reimagining Futurity from Plastic to Plastix, examines the imbrications between materiality, design, and political imaginaries. Taking as a starting point Utopie Plastic—the exhibition in Marseille, France, displaying rare plastic home designs in a nostalgic nod to the optimistic boom of plastic in design, art, and architecture in the 1970s—the project explores the environmental and political underpinnings of future-oriented design in furniture and architecture. If plastic captivated the imaginaries of designers and architects in the 1970s, the double helix of the oil crisis—the late 20th century embargoes and the fossil fuel-based global warming—reoriented the aesthetics of futurity across different material and social coordinates. Plastix (recycled waste plastic fibers) and other recycled and biodegradable substitutes are driving different, eco-smart design utopias that grapple differentially with environmental racism. Through archival research and ethnographic and collaborative research with furniture designers and architects in France, the US, and the UK, I engage the plasticity of utopias in material culture as an ethical orientation for imagining—and designing—just futures in the wake of the climate crisis.