This essay considers the general force of anachronism in the British imperial project in peninsular Southeast Asia, an anachronism that was enacted in the translational efforts of educational officials as well as the curricular programs and educational policies of the colonial administration. The essay refers to this anachronism as a kind of "imperial pastoralism," which aesthetic conflated rurality and husbandry while eschewing the possibility of revolution. The effect, the essay suggests, was not only a politics of linguistic separatism but also a hierarchizing of ethnolinguistic difference and a gradual and increasingly exclusive identification of Malays with Malaysia.

This content is only available via PDF.
© 2007 The Regents of the University of California
You do not currently have access to this content.