4 - Vernacular Equality: The Labor Question in Colonial Malaya, 1920–1940

Presentation Abstract
As growing numbers of Indian and Chinese laborers were recruited for the rubber and tin mining industries in British Malaya, its urban centers—including Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and especially Singapore—emerged as regional centers for the publication and circulation of texts in various vernaculars, ushering in a dramatic expansion of the public sphere. This revolution in mobility, often under profoundly unequal conditions, in turn lent credence to a novel ethical ideal: equality. Drawing on a range of vernacular sources in Chinese, Tamil and Malay, my paper, “Vernacular Equality: The Labor Question in Colonial Malaya, 1920–1940,” examines the emerging social significance of labor to political arguments around equality in British Malaya. It argues that the connected experiences of these migrant communities gave rise to new forms of cultural reform, literary experimentation, and political activism in British Malaya. Focusing on early attempts by various thinkers at translating certain Marxist categories (including “value,” “capital,” and “labour-power”) into Chinese and Tamil, it traces an intellectual history of “equality”—understood as an ethical principle, claimed by several communist writers, and translated into the region’s various vernaculars—as intimately tied to the social history of mass migration. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s analysis of “labour” as a historically determinate form of social mediation, it argues ultimately that these critiques of colonial capitalism, turning on an appreciation of the centrality of labor in constituting social relations, drew their referential and normative purchase from the conditions of mass migration and uneven development in British Malaya.