Seminar Series: Abstract

The localization of 'the Malays'
Prof. Tony Milner

Just who are ‘the Malays’? What it is to be ‘a Malay’ seems to have differed from one era or one regional context to another. It is also far from certain when people called ‘Malay’ by Europeans and other outsiders generally defined themselves in this way. Ought we to speak of a ‘Malay race’ or ‘Malay ethnicity’? Or are such concepts products of a particular phase of European thinking about human classification? Another intriguing question is why ‘the Malays’ have so often expressed the fear that they might ‘disappear from this world’. My paper will discuss the history of Malayness, reaching back to Melaka and earlier, and then considering briefly the fate of the Malay idea in the nation and region building of the last century.