MONOGRAPH
Malhi, Amrita. Decolonising the North, Cracking the Federation: Inside PAS’s History War (and Madani’s Response). ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Trends in Southeast Asia Series, 2026.
Malaysia’s “Green Wave” is usually analysed in electoral terms. Drawing on research conducted in 2024, this monograph took a different approach.
It showed how PAS sought to convert its regional strength in the northern peninsular states into a new politics of sovereignty and citizenship built on historical revisionism. This politics operated effectively across multiple domains: beyond electoral strategy and cultural production, it constituted a genuine historiographical intervention; a systematic reframing of national history.
Through two detailed case studies – Sanusi Nor’s claim on Penang and PAS’s electoral cross-marketing with the film Mat Kilau – the monograph explained how PAS reframed local grievances within a racialised narrative that depicted itself as a decolonising force and its opponents as colonial settlers and compradors.
The stories it told captured imaginations because they “recovered” histories widely believed to have been suppressed by colonial narratives. These stories did not reflect the genuine historical record; their relevance lay in the way they challenged structures of meaning known to have outlived their usefulness – colonial and UMNO-centric national histories.
At the time of writing, the federal Madani government’s response had focused on administrative containment and a future-oriented “decolonisation” narrative framed in terms of geopolitics and economic growth. Whether this approach would work remained an open question explored in the monograph.
ARTICLES
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Enumerating Australia’s “Diverse”: Ethnicity and Raciology in Census and Workplace Diversity Surveys.’ Ethnic & Racial Studies 47, no. 10 (2024).
Drawing on research conducted between 2017 and 2020, this article examined Australia’s short-lived decision to enumerate its population by “ethnicity” rather than “ancestry” – the category it has since decided to retain. The decision was an attempt to address a genuine data problem for advocates pushing for “measurement” to produce better social justice outcomes. Yet it raised questions they had not confronted.
Ethnic labels – and the category “ethnicity” itself – have unstable meanings. Census operations that use them have produced both confusion and genuine social harms in Britain and its former colonies, where enumeration has been a central technology in the construction of race and practices of racialisation. In addition, looking only to Britain and its settler colonies for comparison is no way to organise a policy discussion in a rapidly changing Australia. Advocates have overlooked the societies that growing numbers of Australia’s migrants come from, where census operations have hardened identity categories in a variety of harmful ways.
These histories deserve a place in the discussion, which, at the time of writing, remained shaped by an unacknowledged impulse to impose legibility on the population using categories that resist definition.
Malhi, Amrita. ‘The New Social History of the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60: Locating and Decentring the State in Malaya’s New Villages.’ Bandung: Journal of the Global South 10, no. 3 (2023).
This literature review article evaluated Tan Teng Phee’s Behind Barbed Wire, a new social history of the “New Villages” – the detention camps into which the British colonial state forced more than half a million mostly Chinese Malayans during the Malayan Emergency. The article argued that Tan’s findings helped show the Emergency reconstituted Malaya as a racial state at the point of decolonisation, which, through Left politics, carried the prospect of dismantling its deeply racial structure. The Emergency foreclosed that prospect in the interest of creating a regional order hostile to communism, through the mass spatial and social reconstruction of Malaya’s population, effectively pre-structuring the postcolony before allowing it to come into being. The camps were a key mechanism for this reconstruction. The article located the roots of Malaysia’s current racial structure in the Emergency and its deliberate outcomes.
Gedacht, Joshua and Amrita Malhi. ‘Coercing Mobility – Territory and Displacement in the Politics of Southeast Asian Muslim Movements.’ Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 45, no. 3 (2021) – Special Issue edited by Gedacht, Joshua and Amrita Malhi
This introductory article, co-written with Joshua Gedacht, opened a special issue on Muslim movements in Southeast Asian history that we co-edited. The special issue took up the field’s inter-Asian turn, now one of Asian history’s significant new area-studies models. That model foregrounds mobility, so that circuits that span regions – and the people and movements they produced – are prioritised as units of analysis ahead of bounded colonial territories and postcolonial geo-bodies.
Much of the movement that colonised Southeast Asian Muslims experienced, we argued, was coerced. States produced mobility through warfare and forced exile, and through quieter means of territorialisation – colonial law encroaching on how people held their land, and reorganising once-connected regions as isolated peripheries. The articles in this special issue demonstrated that the experience of coerced displacement left its mark on the politics Muslim movements developed over the colonial period in Southeast Asia.
In the issue, Francis Bradley traced how Siam’s steps to dismantle the Patani sultanate influenced political outlooks across the diaspora it produced, much of which travelled toward Mecca. The Aceh articles by Joshua Gedacht and David Kloos followed two faces of one project: the remapping of Aceh as a colonial periphery. Gedacht analysed how courtly figures were sent into exile to break their connections; and Kloos showed how the connected west coast of Aceh was actively reconfigured as an isolated periphery through the course of the Aceh War. Chiara Formichi found in Kartosuwiryo’s flight from Yogyakarta to West Java the seedbed of an Islamic-state project. My own article read the Malayan Emergency as a militarised redrawing of Malaya’s racial and religious lines, a process that drove out the Malay Muslim Left.
Each case turned on the same paradox: coercion intended to fix people in place produced the wider geographies their movements would claim as their own – geographies that were sometimes material, sometimes only imagined.
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Race, Space, and the Malayan Emergency: Expelling Malay Muslim Communism and Reconstituting Malaya’s Racial State, 1948–1954.’ Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 45, no. 3 (2021).
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Race, Debt and Sovereignty – The “China Factor” in Malaysia’s GE14.’ The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies 107 (2018).
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Like a Child with Two Parents: Race, Religion and Royalty in the Siam-Malaya Frontier, 1895–1902.’ The Muslim World 105, no. 4 (2015).
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Making Spaces, Making Subjects: Land, Enclosure & Islam in Malaya.’ Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 4 (2011).
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Subversion & the Trappings of Royalty in Hikayat Pelanduk Jenaka and Hikayat Hang Tuah.’ Jurnal Filologi Melayu 11 (2003).
Access: Contact ANU Library for a copy
CHAPTERS
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Bordering Malaya’s “Benighted Lands”: Race and Frontiers of Colonialism in Siam’s Malay Muslim Tributaries, 1887–1902.’ In Challenging Cosmopolitanism: Coercion, Mobility and Displacement in Islamic Asia, edited by Joshua Gedacht and R. Michael Feener. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Intercultural Futures: The Fraught Politics of Multiculturalism.’ Griffith Review 55: State of Hope, edited by Julianne Schultz and Patrick Allington. Griffith University/Text Publishing, 2017.
Malhi, Amrita. ‘”We Hope to Raise the Bendera Stambul”: British Forward Movement and the Ottoman Caliphate on the Malay Peninsula.’ In From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop. British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2015.
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Making Spaces, Making Subjects: Land, Enclosure & Islam in Malaya.’ In New Frontiers of Land Control, edited by Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco. Routledge, 2013.
Access: See Journal of Peasant Studies article above.
Malhi, Amrita. ‘Sex, Race & Religion Still Political Weapons in Malaysia.’ In Capturing the Year 2009. 2009.
Access: Contact ANU Library for a copy
Malhi, Amrita. ‘The PAS–BN Conflict in the 1990s: The Politics of Islamic Modernism.’ In Malaysia: Religion, Society & Politics, edited by Virginia Hooker and Norani Othman. ISEAS, 2003.
Access: Contact ANU Library for a copy