Routes of identity: Malay liverpool and the limits of transnationalism

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 83, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 459-480

  Bunnell, Tim ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Identity; Life geographies; Malay seafarers; Oral histories; Southeast asia; Transnationalism

Indexed keywords

EID: 77957013104     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/2010833459     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. See, for example, Stephen Castles and Alistair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2000).
2. Willem van Schendel, "Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in Southeast Asia," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 20, no. 6 (2002) pp. 647-668.
3. Alejandro Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt, "Introduction," Ethnic and Racial Studies (special issue, Transnational Communities), vol. 22, no. (1999) p. 219.
4. Caroline Nagel and Lynn Staeheli, "Citizenship, identity and transnational migration: Arab immigrants to the US," Space and Polity, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004) p. 4.
5. While I certainly saw all of the men concerned as "Malays" at the outset of my study, the use of scare marks here denotes the importance of unsettling any such a priori categorization (for reasons that will be elaborated in subsequent sections of the paper).
6. Some estimates have suggested that there were as many as 500 Malays in Liverpool after World War II but even if this is correct, it would have included men with highly varied degrees of attachment to the city. It is unlikely that the number based or settled in Liverpool was ever more than 100. When I fi rst visited Liverpool in December 2003 there were only around twenty Malay ex-seafarers living in or around the city.
7. Francis E. Hyde, "The expansion of Liverpool's carrying trade with the Far East and Australia 1860-1914," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 6 (1956) p. 154.
8. R. Lawton, "Liverpool and the tropics," in R. W. Steel and R. Mansell Prothero, eds., Geographers and the Tropics: Liverpool Essays (London: Longmans, 1964) pp. 349-375.
9. Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt, "Locating Southeast Asia," in P. H. Kratoska, R. Raben, and H. Schulte Nordholt, eds., Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005) pp. 1-19
10. While "globalization" and "transnationalism" clearly should not be used interchangeably, the emergence of the latter as a fi eld of study was at least in part a result of the intersection of work on migration and globalization. See Peter Kivisto, "Theorizing transnational immigration: a critical review of current efforts," Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 24, no. 4 (2001) pp. 549-577.
11. On Liverpool's decline as a seaport, see Tony Lane, Liverpool: City of the Sea (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). 12 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) pp. 89-90. In this way, for Clifford, fi eldwork becomes "less a matter of localized dwelling and more a series of travel encounters" (p. 2).
12. By 2008, when I spent six months in Liverpool, the club was closed and boarded up.
13. Steven Vertovec, "Transnationalism and identity," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (2001) p. 573.
14. Shamsul A.B., "Debating about identity in Malaysia: A discourse analysis," Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 3 (1996) p. 477.
15. Shamsul, "Debating about identity," p. 478.
16. A similar point is made by James Clifford who asks, "Is the 'taking apart' of identities all on the side of anthropological interpretation?" (Routes, p. 182).
17. The constitutive role of space in the (re)construction of identities and subjectivities has long been recognized in human geography. See, for example, Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford: Polity, 1994).
18. This is not to suggest that memories are ever unproblematic as objective reconstructions of the past. At the same time, however, the elderly and often quite frail men who form the focus of my research in Liverpool do present additional methodological-and ethical-challenges to wider issues about the utility and reliability of memory. I have dealt with some of these issues in an earlier journal article, "Post-maritime transnationalization: Malay seafarers in Liverpool," Global Networks, vol. 7, no. 4 (2007) pp. 412-29.
19. On ethnic essentialism in migrant studies, see: Michael E. Samers, "Diaspora unbound: Muslim identity and the erratic regulation of Islam in France," International Journal of Population Geography, vol. 9 (2003) pp. 351-36421 Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004.
20. "Melayu, Malay, Maleis: Journeys through the identity of a collection," in Barnard, Contesting Malayness, pp. ix-xii. See also: Anthony Reid, "Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities," in Barnard, Contesting Malayness.
21. Reid, "Understanding Melayu"
22. Joel S. Kahn, Other Malays: Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the modern Malay world (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006).
23. Their ability to do so, of course, differentiated across various lines not least gender.
24. See, for example, Alice M. Nah, "Negotiating indigenous identity in postcolonial Malaysia: beyond being 'not quite/not Malay,'" Social Identities, vol. 9, no. 4 (2003) pp. 511-534. The modern politics of indigeneity necessitated attempts at defi nitional clarity as to what and who counted as Malay, the boundaries of which were of course defi ned in opposition to ethno-racial others.
25. See Kahn, Other Malays; Eric C. Thompson, Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007). For a much earlier article which makes similar conceptual points about rural spaces in Southeast Asia, see Jonathan Rigg, "Redefi ning the village and rural life: Lessons from Southeast Asia," Geographical Journal, vol. 160, no. 2 (2004) pp. 123-134.
26. It is important to note the gendered nature of the mobilities and associated identity shifts of the seamen who form the focus of the larger study from which this paper emerges.
27. C. A. Vlieland, "The population of the Malay peninsula: A study in human migration," Geographical Review vol. 24, no. 1 (1934) p. 65.
28. Interview at 7 Jermyn Street, Liverpool, 1 August 2006.
29. Malcolm Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1990) p. 31.
30. Research on the migration of people from the "Boyanese" people, from the island of Bawean, has attracted particular attention. See, for example, Jacob Vredenbregt, "Bawean Migrations," Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vol. 120, no. 1 (1964) pp. 109-139.
31. Iskandar Mydin, "City lights: Pre-war Singapore's allure for rural migrants," The Heritage (annual journal of the National Museum, Singapore), vol. 10 (1989) pp. 5-12.
32. It should also be noted that cartographic representations themselves can give rise to collective territorial imaginings. See, for example, Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
33. Historically, Malay rule and political identifi cation worked through forms of allegiance that were not based upon clearly demarcated territorial boundaries (Anthony C. Milner, Kerajaan: Malay Political Culture on the Eve of Colonial Rule, Tuscon AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1982).
34. National Archives, CO 273/559/22. For a brilliant examination of this issue more broadly, see Laura Tabili, "We Ask For British Justice": Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
35. Nagel and Staeheli have made a similar point recently in their work on the linkages and associated identities of Arab immigrants in the US. Noting often highly localized long-distance connections, they "caution against assuming that migrants share a uniform attachment to homeland" ("Citizenship, identity and transnational migration," p. 20). An example here may be cited from another, less historical, strand of my research related to migration. To consider migrants from Aceh in Malaysiaas simply "Indonesians" is to ignore the often very different ways in which people from that region of Indonesia, with its history of separatist struggle, relate to Indonesian national identity as compared to fellow citizens from, say, Java. See Alice M. Nah and Tim Bunnell, "Ripples of hope: Acehnese refugees in post-tsunami Malaysia," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography vol. 26, no. 2 (2005), pp. 249-256.
36. Donald Emmerson, "Southeast Asia: what's in a name?" Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 1 (1984) pp. 1-21; Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998); Kratoska, Raben and Schulte Nordholt, "Locating Southeast Asia."
37. Benedict Anderson has famously examined the way in which modern technologies, such as the novel and newspapers, made possible a collective conception of "meanwhile" (Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991).
38. John Agnew, "The territorial trap: the geographical assumptions of international relations theory" Review of International Political Economy, vol. 1 (1994) pp. 53-80; Neil Brenner, "Beyond statecentrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies," Theory and Society, vol. 28 (1999) pp. 39-78. In the context of migration studies, see Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick-Schiller, "Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: an essay in historical epistemology," International Migration Review, vol. 37, no. 3 (2003) pp. 576-610.
39. Fieldwork notes at 7 Jermyn Street, Liverpool, 29 September 2004. 42 Mohamed Nor Hamid, for example, who was born in Tanjong Keling, requested in an interview in Liverpool that I bring a Singapore fl ag during my next research trip so as to counterbalance the dominance of Malaysian national imagery at the clubhouse (interview by author, Liverpool, 10 September 2004).
40. K. G. Tregonning, Home Port Singapore: A History of Straits Steamship Company Limited, 1960-1965 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1967).
41. Mohamed Nor Hamid, interview by author, Liverpool, 10 September 2004.
42. Mr. Mokhtar, interview by author, Kampung Serkam, Malacca, 17 February 2008. 46 Bunnell, "Post-maritime transnationalization."
43. Linda G. Basch, Nina Glick-Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Basel: Gordon and Breach Science, 1994).
44. Or, as Francis Collins has put it recently, this "adds up to nothing less than methodological nationalism across borders" ("Transnationalism unbound: Detailing new subjects, registers and spatialities of cross-border lives," Geography Compass, vol. 3, no. 1, 2009, p. 437).
45. Graham Smith, "Transnational politics and the politics of the Russian diaspora," Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 22, no. 3 (1999) pp. 500-523
46. Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt, "Introduction."
47. Jon Beaverstock, Richard Smith and Peter Taylor, "World city network: a new metageography?" Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 90, no. 1 (2000) pp. 123-134.
48. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). As one of the referees for this paper insightfully pointed out, Siegel's notion of "overhearing" may be said to deterritorialize nationalism while avoiding methodological nationalism. It is worth clarifying, however, that in contrast to Siegel (and Anderson, Imagined Communities), overhearing among Liverpool Malays appears to have been based much more upon oral communication than through the circulation of print media, such as newspapers. 53 Bunga is the Malay word for fl ower. All of the ships of the Malaysian International Shipping Corporation (MISC) were named after fl owers indigenous to Malaysia.
49. This will form part of the book which I am writing from the Malay Routes project: World City Routes: Mapping Malay Liverpool.
50. World Bank, The East Asian Economic Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
51. Lane, Liverpool.
52. Fadzil Mohamed, who visited Kuala Lumpur in 2003, not having been there since 1946, for example, was wowed by the tall buildings on the city's skyline. His main concern before returning was were modern toilets (tandas) not only in Kuala Lumpur but even in his home village, Tanjong Keling, Malacca. Malaysia had become "just like Europe" and, as far as household facilities were concerned, even surpassed Liverpool. Mr. Fadzil told me with some pride that his family's house in Tanjong Keling had fi ve bedrooms, all with ensuite bathrooms (interview by author, Liverpool, 11 October 2004). Mr. Fadzil's son, Paul, noted that his father's view of Malaysia as "modern" after his trip had made him noticeably prouder to be associated with Malaysia (interview by author, Liverpool, 18 December 2005).
53. See also Bunnell, "Post-maritime transnationalization."
54. Mohamed Nor Hamid, interview by author, Liverpool, 29 September 2004.
55. Tim Bunnell, "Multiculturalism's regeneration: celebrating Merdeka (Malaysian independence) in a European Capital of Culture," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 33 (2008) pp. 251-267. This paper also considers the way in which long-distance identity-constituting connections exist alongside and in relation to different scales of identifi cation within Britain. Feelings of not belonging or fully belonging in a given locality or to Liverpool or Britain, including those generated by instances of racism, may reasonably be expected to heighten a desire to reinvigorate or forge longdistance social connections.
56. For coverage of the rise of Islam in postcolonial Malaysia, see Hussin Mutalib, Islam in Malaysia: From Revivalism to Islamic State (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1993). On the way in which Islam has become part of practices and performances of Malay-ness, see Patricia Sloane Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays (Houndmills UK: MacMillan, 1999).
57. This includes Mr. Jaafar Mohamed who returned to Singapore in 2000 after having been out of contact with his family for almost four decades. He did not recognize his son and daughter at the airport (Jaafar Mohamed, interview by author, Liverpool, 10 October 2004).
58. Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Smith's work and the term "translocal" are considered in more detail in the next section.
59. Jaafar Mohamed's daughter, Rosita, recalls annual Christmas parties and that it was during those times that she felt like she belonged to a "community" (interview by author, Liverpool, 25 April 2008).
60. See also Bunnell, "Post-maritime transnationalization." 66 In ethnic terms, in addition to Hashim Malik who identifi ed as both Ambonese and Malay (see note 30), Jaafar Mohamed identifi ed as both Boyanese and "Singapore Malay" (Jaafar Mohamed, interview by author, Liverpool, 9 May 2008).
61. Based on the recollections of the daughter of Ben Youp, Joan Higgins, who grew up at 144 Huskisson Street (interview by author, Liverpool, 12 September 2004).
62. Farida Chapman visited Number 7 with her siblings when her father, Fadzil Mohamed, was home from sea (interview by author, Liverpool, 2 August 2008).
63. The issue of how these interactions-and associated stories, gifts and gossip-changed over time is complex and defi es brief summary here. However, one important point to note is the rising prominence of Islamic imagery and practices including in the décor of Number 7 Jermyn Street from 2004. While seafarers in the postwar period saw being modern primarily in terms of the acquisition or possession of things, such as certain brands of American t-shirts, Islam is today central to what it means to be modern and Malay (Sloane, Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship). 70 Smith, Transnational Urbanism.
64. "A global sense of migrant places: towards a place perspective in the study of migrant transnationalism," Global Networks, vol. 9, no. 2 (2009) p. 273. Italics in the original.
65. Gielis, "A global sense of migrant places," p. 283.
66. Here he draws upon the work of Doreen Massey on relational senses of place and Arjun Appadurai's conception of place as "translocality" (Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); Arjun Appadurai, "The right to participate in the work of the imagination," Joke Brouwer, Philip Brookman and Arjen Mulder, eds., TransUrbanism (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002, pp. 32-47).
67. "A global sense of migrant places," p. 280.
68. Many of the ex-seamen whom I interviewed said that they had remitted money to their families in Southeast Asia over the years. Hashim Malik sent money monthly to his mother in Singapore and paid for her to perform the Haj (interview with author, Liverpool, 1 August 2006). Hashim had no contact with his brother in Singapore but recalls receiving a big pack of dodol (a toffee-like snack) by airmail from his "half brother" (interview with author, Liverpool, 10 October 2004).
69. For examples published recently in this journal, see the special issue introduced by Apichai W. Shipper, "Introduction: Politics of citizenship and transnational gendered migration in East and Southeast Asia," Pacifi c Affairs, vol. 83, no. 1 (2010) pp. 11-29.
70. Clearly, this has implications for what and where counts as "Pacifi c affairs".
71. "Friendship, networks and transnationality in a World City: Antipodean transmigrants in London," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (2005) pp. 287-305.
72. This point has long been recognized by geographers. See, for example, Katherine Mitchell, "Transnational discourse: bringing the geography back in," Antipode, vol. 29, no. 2 (1997) pp. 101-114.