Racialisation in Malaysia: Multiracialism, multiculturalism, and the cultural politics of the possible

This article focuses on racialisation as a signifying practice and cultural process that attributes difference in Malaysia. It attempts to think with and against the concept of racialisation with an aim to add to a clearer understanding of the cultural politics of ‘race’. It focuses on the hierarchies of power and marginalisation, visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion that are built into dominant discourses and modes of knowledge production about race, citizenship, and culture in Malaysia. This article aims to show how the political mobilisation of race as a remnant of colonial governmentality disciplines social processes through the notion of multiculturalism. For this reason, it sets up state-endorsed ‘multiracialism’ and a people-driven ‘multiculturalism’ as oppositional ways of thinking about race. It concludes by briefly identifying some key drivers for cultural transformation and speculating if these people-centred processes can offer a more imaginative racial horizon.

Reporting Security: Postcolonial Governmentality in the United Nations’ Trusteeship System

This article examines the political rationality and governance practices that emerged in the course of the international politics of decolonization. It focuses primarily on the UN trusteeship system, within which the former League of Nations mandates were continued by the trusteeship powers. In this process, the trustees' policies were placed under international scrutiny. The article ties in with International Political Sociology's increased interest in historical perspectives. In particular, it asks how the political rationality of the trusteeship system differs from colonial governmentality. Two arguments are put forward: first, international governing, as can be seen from the trusteeship system, is characterized by a postcolonial governmentality that continues central elements of colonial governmentality, but transfers them to the international level. Second, following Latour, it is argued that trusteeship governance is constituted by forms of knowledge production and the bureaucratic circulation of information that continue to shape the governance of international organizations today. To this end, the article takes up in particular the reporting system of the trusteeship system as well as its central instruments of knowledge production: the visiting missions, the petition system, and the collection of data through questionnaires.

The Indigenous Public Child and Neoliberal Settler-Colonialism: Theorizing the Intersections between the White Possessive and Neoliberal Accountability Regimes

This article examines accountability discourses in Alberta’s legislative debates on child intervention during the years 2016–19. I demonstrate that the supposedly apolitical discourse of accountability functions as a form of neoliberal and settler-colonial governmentality that reaffirms the legitimacy of settler state intervention into the pathologized Indigenous family. Using the death of Serenity in Alberta’s child intervention system in 2014, and the subsequent legislative debates surrounding her death and the lack of accountability in the child intervention system as a case study, I demonstrate that accountability as both a discourse and a mechanism moves between positioning Albertans-as-Victims, Albertans-as-Stakeholders, and, finally, Albertans-as-Responsible-Agents. Ultimately, I argue that shifting discourses of accountability, which move from governmental to societal to individual accountability, re-centre a relationship of settler possession in relation to the Indigenous Public Child, whose life and death become available for consumption by settler publics in exchange for governmental credibility and accountability.

The limits of literature as liberation: Colonialism, governmentality, and the humanist subject

Scholars in both the humanities and management remain attached to the idea that literature will set us free. Whether this is because literary text seems unconstrained by our epistemes or reading literature offers a practice through which we will be able to shape ourselves into the people we want to be, many of us understand literature as something that offers us a chance to emancipate ourselves from the regime of knowledge we have now. Nevertheless, as the history of literature as colonial governmentality suggests, literature and literary study have been crucial forms of knowledge-power for creating and maintaining organizational structures as well as producing the willing subjects that make those structures work. This being so, how is it that are we still interested in using literature to make “better” people, whether the people in question are ”better” managers or their subordinates, rather than reorganizing literary study in the contemporary university?