Research
My dissertation, Indefinite Excisions: Revising indigeneity at the boundaries between forests and plantations, investigates the interrelations between forest management, monocrop plantation landscapes, and racial hierarchies in Malaysia from colonialism until present day. I rethink the conventional idea that colonial extraction operates as a unilateral practice of dispossession by adopting the excision as a unit of analysis. In 1914, the British introduced the excision as a practice that simultaneously institutionalized the forest as a timber plantation while demarcating parts of it for rubber plantation development. The British managed this complementary ecology of plantations in conjunction with racial hierarchies, confining Orang Asli (ancestrally forest dwelling communities) in the context of forestry and excluding the Malays (coastal natives of the peninsula) from the rubber plantation economy. Still implemented in Malaysia, excisions produce a similar complementary ecology of plantation to index different racial coordinates. Through a postcolonial indigeneity-driven affirmative agenda (i.e., Bumiputra), Malays became the full beneficiaries of agricultural extraction at the expense of Orang Asli. Based on 24 months of archival work in Malaysia and the United Kingdom, and ethnographic fieldwork with scientists, artists, ancestrally forest-dwelling communities in Malaysia, I trace colonial excisions into the present to show how they animate multivalent registers of forest that both strengthen and challenge established hierarchies of power. Specifically, I examine how postcolonial scientists use colonial forestry to bolster Bumiputra indigeneity by honing rubberwood forest plantations and transforming forests into necroecologies through failed sustainable forestry and conservation efforts. I discuss how Orang Asli challenge Bumiputra indigeneity by cultivating rubber plots as analogic kinship networks of forest. Similarly, I explore how mixed-race artists rethink indigeneity by adopting rubber as anti-colonial kin to transform rubber plantations into forests. By examining these multivalent registers of forest and the corresponding claims of indigeneity, I show how extraction operates as a generative intervention that enables plural notions of socio-environmental justice.
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 will examine 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.
I will expand this project from British Malaya to include Nigeria and Tanzania——locations of the main imperial biochemistry laboratories——and, in addition to archival research, engage in community-based collaborations with local scientists, nutritional medical practitioners, agricultural workers, and food industry stakeholders. 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.
As the Malayan Emergency was officially declared, 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 pre-emergence herbicides like CMU and 2,4-D & 2,4-T——the main ingredients of rainbow agents——in efforts to thwart communist guerilla operations. With limited success, the British employed both ground and aerial spraying techniques on communist guerilla rainforest shelter and foodstuffs cultivation plots 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 1940, and were later deployed extensively in the Vietnam war. Moreover, CMU and varying concentrations of 2,4-D & 2,4-T were widely used in agricultural trials 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 the agricultural, rubber and military industries in Malaya, and beyond, to re-situate the Malayan Emergency not as an isolated event, but as a strategic platform for consolidating the technical affordances between racialized logics of extraction, science and warfare at a global scale.
Coming soon.