History Commons^™

Map, Census, Museum: Imagining The Malaysian Nation-State And The Malay Identity, Jackson Rockett

Honors Theses

Using historian Benedict Anderson's framework from his seminal text Imagined Communities of examining nation-building and identity construction through colonial artifacts, this thesis turns to maps, censuses, and museums to better understand the colonial and post-colonial imagining of the country that is now known as Malaysia. Reconciling with regional histories that predate the nation-state and defy the contemporary boundaries of territoriality, this thesis largely seeks to elucidate the contestation between colonially-imposed ideas of spatiality, categorization, and the reproduction of history with the modern Malaysian nation-state and the conflation of ethnicity with nationalism from which much of this contestation is derived from.