‘Malaysia’ Resurveyed: From Representation and Separation to Alternative Tropical Futurities

This essay, in the form of a literary survey, revisits the idea of “Malaysia” by examining how the interlinked practices of representation and separation have been fundamental to the reification of tropicality in the region once known as the Malay Archipelago: contemporary maritime Southeast Asia. It suggests how the two contradictory facets of colonial-era tropicality as envisioned in British Malaya (i.e., a fecund wasteland and inescapable degradation) have become embedded in the logic of governance in postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore. The persistent effects of this discourse in the present are discussed in terms of the challenges facing mobilisation over issues of climate change and ecology (particularly since these discussions are limited by the borders of nation-states). In addressing both historical concerns and tropical futurity, this essay calls for a “decolonial ecology” to address present Anthropogenic challenges and to imagine other tropical futures through novel forms of representation.