Book Review: Race, Education and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British

Book Review: Race, Education and

Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British

Colonial Legacies and a Culture of

Migration by Sin Yee Koh

In Race, Education and Citizenship: Mobile

Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies and a Culture

of Migration , Sin Yee Koh offers a study of the

migratory trajectories of tertiary-educated mobile

Malaysian migrants and explores how the legacies

of colonialism continue to impact upon the

meanings of race, education and citizenship in this

context. Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani strongly

recommends this book to scholars interested in

conceptualising migration and citizenship practices

through a post-colonial lens.

Race, Education and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians,

British Colonial Legacies and a Culture of Migration.

Sin Yee Koh. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017.

Find this

book:

I am one of you. Like you, I am also

trying to figure out my views about the

country I was born in, about whether I

will return, about the very real and

contradictory considerations each of us

grapple with in our citizenship and

mobility decisions.

So reads the first page of Sin Yee Koh’s study of

the migratory trajectories of tertiary-educated

mobile Malaysian migrants. This extract, taken from

the research blog that Koh set up as part of her

study, sets the tone for the compelling work which

is to follow. This research is made all the more

poignant in that it was inspired by Koh’s own

experiences and some of the contradictions she has

faced concerning her own migratory trajectory from

Malaysia.

This well-laid-out book starts by providing the

reader with a historical understanding of the legacy

of British colonialism and the making of modern

Malay(si)a. Given that British imperial rule was a

crucial factor in Malaysia’s transition from a colony

to an independent modern nation state, Koh’s study

explores how colonialism has impacted and

continues to impact upon the meanings of race,

education and citizenship in the context of

migration.

After providing a historical overview, Koh explains

how she understands a ‘culture of migration’ in the

Malaysian case. One of her core arguments is that

it has been, in part, an inevitable response to

structural constraints in post-colonial Malaysia. The

British colonial legacies of racial stereotypes, Malay

indigeneity and a race-stratified education system

have been inherited and exacerbated by the post-

colonial Malaysian state in the form of bumiputera-

differentiated policies. This has led non-bumiputera

Malaysians, the focus of Koh’s study, to appear to

regard migration as ‘inevitable’ (147). For readers

such as myself who might come across this book

ignorant of the Malaysian context, ‘bumiputera’

translates to ‘sons of soil’ and those deemed ‘non-

bumiputera’ are typically Malaysian-Chinese and

Malaysian-Indians.

While arguing that mobile Malaysians’ culture of

migration can be understood in relation to the

colonial legacies of race, education and citizenship,

Koh’s analysis goes beyond ‘blaming’ colonialism

for social phenomena in the post-colonial period

(255). Instead, Koh places equal emphasis on both

colonial and post-colonial interventions, highlighting

their interrelationships and probing the processes

whereby post-colonial legacies have been

‘reinforced, appropriated, reconstructed and

enhanced in the post-colonial period’ (15).

Image Credit: Kuala Lumpur International Airport

( eGuide Travel CC BY 2.0 )

Koh drew upon an innovative methodological

strategy for this research in that she explores

historical forces (through archival research) as a

means to understand contemporary migration

phenomena (through interviews and personal

reflections). These interviews, of which there are 67,

were conducted with mobile Malaysians living in the

United Kingdom, Singapore and Malaysia. Through

adopting a post-colonial approach that traverses the

historical with the contemporary, Koh sought to

examine the interactions between macro-structural

forces and her respondents’ interpretations of and

reactions to these.

By identifying common themes and patterns in

mobile Malaysians’ interpretations and

understandings of themselves, the author

demonstrates how power inequalities persist and

limit human lives in material and immaterial ways.

As eloquently expressed by Koh:

The material are manifested as migration

flows and the resultant migrant social

networks; while the immaterial take the

form of internalised beliefs, ideas,

emotions, ways of knowing, norms and

practices that are interrelated to acts of

migration (23).

Through discussing individual cases, Koh explores

how migration and its related practices acquire

particular socialised meanings. These are passed

on from one generation to the next. In this way,

migration becomes an internalised cultural practice

that is not necessarily recognised as a response to

structural constraints posed by Malaysia’s

bumiputera-differentiated citizenship (18).

While Koh was able to reach non-bumiputera

respondents through her networks and snowball

sampling, this does mean that the study had a

limited scope as it attracted those who might have

already resonated with the research project, a point

Koh recognises. The slim number of bumiputera

respondents in the study (7.5 per cent) is an area

of intrigue in itself, in that it left me feeling there

was a need for a complementary study which

probed their experiences. However, Koh, by being

perceived as ‘one of us’ (31), was able to engage

with her respondents and analyse their narratives

with a richness that an ‘outsider’ would have not

achieved.

This brings us back to what I consider one of the

chief strengths of the study: namely, its origins in

Koh’s own reflections, one of which was the

recognition of the tendency of many mobile

Malaysians she has come across, including herself,

to retain Malaysian citizenship ‘at all costs’ despite

migrating to other areas (9). Her analysis shows

how mobile Malaysians paradoxically sustain

feelings of perpetual belonging to ‘Malaysia’ at the

same time as feeling distrust towards the Malaysian

government. This raises the question, posed by

Koh, of why there is ‘a strong narrative of

unquestioned belonging to Malaysia, despite

overseas Malaysians (real and perceived) narratives

of racial discrimination and being ‘‘second class

citizens’’ in Malaysia’ (11).

While Koh’s respondents conceptualised their

citizenship in relation to ‘loyalty to Malaysia’, this is

not about the nation state but rather about the

presence of family members in Malaysia, nostalgic

memories of living in the country and an

ethnonational sense of pride. Their feeling

of loyalty, primarily attached to locality and kinship,

loomed large in their imagined hopes for a future

return to Malaysia, as well as the reason they keep

their Malaysian citizenship ‘just in case’ (213). Inj

this sense, the loyalty articulated by mobile

Malaysians does not seem to translate into civic

and political acts such as contributions to

homeland development.

After discussing her key themes of education, race

and citizenship, Koh dedicates a chapter to the

subject of returning to Malaysia. This chapter

usefully demonstrates how the post-colonial state’s

return migration and reverse brain drain policies

have been ineffective, derived as they are from the

perspective of human resource needs. As such, they

have ‘neglected to consider the overall socio-

cultural and racial environment mobile Malaysians

will be returning to’ (247). Koh recommends that

return migration policies should be designed

bearing in mind the citizenship, education, race and

minority rights policies that led to emigration in the

first place.

In Koh’s concluding chapter, she reflects upon how

Malaysia’s racialisation of class inequalities makes

class itself difficult to study. While Koh

acknowledges that class is intimately linked to

mobile Malaysians’ access to their preferred

education streams, I still felt that the analysis would

have benefited from a greater acknowledgement of

the classifying and performative nature of class

within this context. Having personally grown up in

South Africa, I found that Koh’s study illuminates

the need for comparative analyses of different post-

colonial contexts, which offers the possibility of

‘identifying similarities and divergences in different

colonial and post-colonial experiences and how

these subsequently influence education, citizenship

and migration’ (272). This is particularly interesting

when considering how the relic of racial

stratification in the education system inherited by

British colonial rule echoes other observations on

colonial legacies in this sphere elsewhere (75).

This book challenges existing literature on skilled

migration and flexible citizenship by showing how

such migration may be racialised and by

highlighting the need to conceptualise migration and

citizenship practices historically. Koh’s analysis

shows how race as a colonial legacy initiates and is

in turn perpetuated by mobile Malaysians’ culture of

migration. The post-colonial approach she adopts

makes a novel contribution to the fields of

migration studies and geography in that it

demonstrates how ‘the real impact of colonial

legacies lies in the internalised understandings

about race, education and citizenship that continue

to define the behaviours of generations after the end

of the colonial period’ (218). I strongly recommend

this book for scholars interested in post-colonial

studies, migration, citizenship and race, as well as

anyone looking for a more nuanced insight into the

formation of contemporary Malaysia.

Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani is in the third year of her

PhD in Education at the University of Sussex. Her

dissertation focuses on the development of

aspirations of young people living in post-apartheid

South Africa. She has a background in Social

Anthropology from UCT (South Africa) and SOAS

(London). Read more by Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani .

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and

not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or

of the London School of Economics.