7 - Rethinking Modernity: State, Ethnicity, and Class in the Forging of a Modern Urban Malaysia

Summary

In recent discussions, a well-established conception of “modernity” is viewed as a structure of temporal contradiction. While a temporal form of modernity allows a diversity of historically concrete modernisms, differences are supposedly worked out within a hierarchical logic of contemporaneity. The modern experience is equated with the history or trajectory of capitalist modernity and technical rationality in the West, along with a culturally and socially accomplished form of life that go along with industrial society. A privileging of the Euro-American narrative of modernity as the normative leads to the mis-recognition of new meanings of the “modern” in the non-Western world. This misrecognition in turn explains the pervading language of original and copy, first and late comers, and alternative, aberrant, or deviant modernities in the theorization of non-Western modern conditions. The endeavours of non-Westerners — along with the notion of their autonomy — and their new categories and meanings of the “modern” are rendered as insignificant — or worse, as simply derivative. Instead, such new meanings should force us to rethink the conceptions and categories of “modernity” itself.

Using evidence from Malaysia, this chapter calls for a move away from notions of general patterns to more concrete and historically specific conditions, and for the incorporation of different and even conflicting principles beyond that of capitalist or instrumental rationality when theorizing modernity. I suggest that the contests around the changing notions of nation, “Malay-ness” and class are central sites for the rethinking of Malaysian modernity and ideas of the modern. The city, as a key site for the formation and expression of a “modern” society, is not only an important locale where these contests are played out, but also more importantly, the locus where emerging identity discourses and various cultural visions of modernity are actively reconstituting urban space.

The new socio-cultural subjectivities and spatial transformations in contemporary Malaysia can be understood not so much in terms of the logic of a universal capitalist progress — these days called “globalization” — or development but instead as a way by which people struggle to derive power, class, and cultural status from their positions within the state's modernizing discursive practices.