This book is an exploration of the relationship between irregular migrants, many originating from southern Philippines and the sea, in their struggle against the realities of state power in Sabah. As their numbers grow exponentially into the 21st century, the only solution currently provided by the Malaysian government is routine repatriation. Yet, despite increased border security, they continue to return. Thus the question: why do deported migrants return, time and again, despite the serious risk of being caught? This book explores the ways in which these irregular migrants contest inconvenient national sea boundaries, the trauma of detention and deportation, and other impositions of state power by drawing on supernatural support from the sea itself. The sea empowers them, and through individual narratives of the sea, we learn that the migrants’ encounter with the state and its legal system only intensifies rather than discourages their relationship with the Malaysian state.

This book is an exploration of the relationship between irregular migrants, many originating from southern Philippines and the sea, in their struggle against the realities of state power in Sabah. As their numbers grow exponentially into the 21st century, the only solution currently provided by the Malaysian government is routine repatriation. Yet, despite increased border security, they continue to return. Thus the question: why do deported migrants return, time and again, despite the serious risk of being caught? This book explores the ways in which these irregular migrants contest inconvenient national sea boundaries, the trauma of detention and deportation, and other impositions of state power by drawing on supernatural support from the sea itself. The sea empowers them, and through individual narratives of the sea, we learn that the migrants' encounter with the state and its legal system only intensifies rather than discourages their relationship with the Malaysian state.

This book is an ethnographic study of migrants, refugees and ‘temporary’ people in Malaysia, incorporating narratives, personal stories, and observations of everyday life in Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown, Penang. Rather than focusing on specific migrant communities or refugee ‘camps’, the book takes subaltern cosmopolitanism as its central lens to look at how different and diverse communities of non-citizen ‘pendatang’ (aliens) co-habit, work and live together in Malaysia. Urban centers in Malaysia offer the space for informality that allow stateless and undocumented people to seek out opportunities, while also finding ways to assimilate or even ‘disappear’ into the fabric of society. The book focuses on the notion of ‘contaminations’, rather than migration or migrants, to underscore one of the most important findings of the ethnographic study – that migrant life in Malaysia is critically integral, embedded and interwoven into the everyday life in the city - shaping and affecting all aspects of daily life from production and supply chains, food service networks, cultural and religious practices, waste and recycling work, to more intimate and private contexts such as romantic relationships, family life and sex-work. Hybridity, inter-mixing and bastardization are part and parcel of everyday urbanism in KL and Penang – these ‘contaminating elements’ challenge and disrupt categories of the ‘national’ and categories such as insider/outsider, national purity, and politically constructed divisions between ethnic and racial groups. The book thus relies upon detailed ethnographic narratives curated over a decade of study, offering students interested in fieldwork research insights into the types of engagements and commitments necessary for helping build the complex, uneasy and destabilizing knowledge that characterizes critical ethnography.

This book consists of nine chapters, each an in-depth case study into a specific non-mainstream or marginalized online community in Malaysia. The authors come from diverse backgrounds to talk about how new media can both assist and hinder maligned minorities, ignored ethnicities or the often attacked migrants in their day to day lives. The book makes a strong contribution to Malaysian studies which highlights the other and represents minority viewpoints to challenge the belief that Malaysia’s online space is monolithic and limited to several mainstream discourses in Malaysian scholarship.

This book looks at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrants globally who bear disproportionate burdens of health disparities. Centering the voices of migrants as anchors for theorizing health, the chapters adopt an array of decolonizing and interventionist methodologies that offer conceptual communicative resources for re-organizing economics, politics, culture, and society in logics of care. Each chapter focuses on the health of migrants during the pandemic, highlighting the role of communication in amplifying and solving the health crisis experienced by migrants. The chapters draw together various communicative resources and practices tied to migrant negotiations of precarity and exclusion. Health is situated amidst the forces of authoritarianism, disinformation, hate, and exploitation targeting migrant bodies. The book builds a narrative archive witnessing this fundamental geopolitical rupture in the 21st century, documenting the violence built into the zeitgeist of labor exploitation amidst neoliberal transformations, situating health with the extractive and exploitative forms of organizing migrant labor. The book is essential reading for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses for scholars studying critical and global health, development, and participatory communication, migration, globalization, international and intercultural communication interested in the questions of precarity and marginality of health during pandemics.

In Indonesia’s Riau Islands Province — a place envisioned as a distinctly “Malay Province” upon its legal formation in 2002 — ethnic Malays are the proud heirs and custodians of a rich legacy associated with a once-sprawling Malay empire that stretched across present-day transnational borders from Indonesia, to Singapore, to Malaysia. Malays of Bugis descent have long played a disproportionately central role in the history (and the historiography or “history-telling”) of the region that now encompasses Indonesia’s Riau Islands Province. While steadfastly “Malay”, members of this community readily acknowledge that their ethnically Bugis roots maintain an enduring historical and ideological salience in their everyday lives. However, transregional economic trends and rapid sociodemographic shift shaped by ongoing migration flows have led to feelings of “marginalization” (peminggiran) among the islands’ Malay-Bugis community. This has led them to claim that they are being gradually pushed to the literal and figurative “edges” of social life in the Riau Islands Province. Fears that a one-time ethnic “majority is becoming a minority” (mayoritas menjadi minoritas) have fuelled feelings of inter-ethnic resentment, and have shaped provincial government policies geared toward the “preservation” of Malay custom. While international focus continues to centre on Indonesia’s Chinese-pribumi divide as diagnostic of Indonesian inter-ethnic and religious relations on edge, a grounded assessment of ethnicity in the Riau islands offers an alternative perspective on these important issues.

In Chasing Archipelagic Dreams, David R. Saunders demonstrates that the withdrawal of the British imperial state from Sabah did not result in the decolonization of the territory. From the late 1940s to the 1960s, international anti-colonialism interacted with regional competition over Sabah to result in a paradoxical increase of British power and influence on the ground. Meanwhile, ethnic, social, and political heterogeneity in Sabah contributed to fragmentation and disunity, undermining the development of a local anti-colonial movement. Instead, a class of influential local elites seized power as competing attempts by the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaya to incorporate the territory into their respective archipelagic spheres grew in strength. Due to these local and international rivalries, Saunders argues, Sabah's eventual merger with the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 prompted an extension of colonial-style rule, resource extraction, the suppression of local autonomy, and the imposition of an externally-configured national identity. Chasing Archipelagic Dreams underscores the significance of regional rivalries in the South China Sea and highlights the fate of subaltern communities bisected by (post)colonial borders.