Ethnicity is a turbulent factor in Malaysian politics and society. Through decades of inter-ethnic tension fostered by ideological engineering, itself building on a history of ethnic manipulation and polarisation in colonial times, racialised tension has remained at best dormant and at worst prone to erupt in riots reminiscent of the May 1969 riots. This study examines the discourse of ethnicity from Malaysia’s colonial roots up to the mid-20th century and beyond, seeking to highlight how trauma and struggle were integral to the very formation of ethnic consciousness. This work will also explore how, despite numerous writers questioning the naive “essentialising” of ethnicity, they no less mistakenly perceive ethnicity in terms which reduce it to a de-centred hybridised performance. The works of writers like Colin Abraham, Sumit Mandal and Maznah Mohamad will be surveyed to elucidate the traumatic element inherent to ethnicity itself. A Lacanian psychoanalytical framework will be used to argue, with a special focus on the Malays, that ethnic solidarity should rather be grounded in a constructive primordial frustration, i.e., it is a traumatic anti-essence which will ignite solidarity and a mutual longing for democracy among the various ethnic groups. Ontological trauma—not a universal essence, not cultural particulars, not deconstructed performatives and certainly not political ideology—could be the force that compels Malaysia’s volatile ethnic groups to co-exist and work together in nation-building.
