Inventing Malayanness: Race, education and Englishness in colonial Malaya.

Drawing together various rubrics from Postcolonial Studies and Asian Studies, this dissertation examines the colonial travel narratives of three British writers who shaped the ideological construct of Malaya for the British reading public from the late nineteenth century onwards: Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess. It argues that a close engagement with the work of these three novelists---supplemented by readings of other primary texts and by historical archival records on colonial education---indicate that three key concepts were central to creating and ordering a sense of Malaya within the colonial imagination: race, language and education. Key to the ideological fiction of Malaya was the concept of a plural society---one which was divided along racial lines, and between the native races and the alien races. This plural society was further kept within their separate racial containers through language and education policies---a procedure that was common throughout the British Empire. ''British Malaya during the colonial era was structured very similarly to other colonies; yet, this dissertation proposes that British Malaya---now contemporary Singapore and Malaysia---may present a case of the postcolonial nation which could subvert existing theoretical paradigms within both Colonial Studies and Asian Studies. Unlike the typical paradigm of the economically dependent and politically chaotic postcolonial nation, Malaysia and Singapore have both achieved impressive economic growth post-independence, Singapore in particular reaching first world status in a matter of decades. This dissertation thus seeks to investigate---through an examination of how Malaysia and Singapore were ideologically shaped during the colonial era---possible reasons for this exceptionalism, and how this uniqueness then translates into paradigms of dependency within colonial studies.Ph.D.Asian historyAsian literatureComparative literatureEnglish literatureEthnic studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127018/2/3305011.pd