Overview
- An ethnographic study of migrants and refugees living in global cities of Southeast Asia
- Provides insights into lives of displaced Asian communities living under the shadow of globalization
- Focuses also on the Rohingya community, and sex workers in Malaysia
- Includes reflections on subaltern migrant cosmopolitanism in in Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown, Penang
- Delves into the intersections of urban informality and lives of the displaced seen through narratives and stories
Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia (PMSHRA)
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About this book
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.
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.
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Keywords
- Temporary Migration in Malaysia
- Displacement and Refugees in Southeast Asia
- Urban Refugees in Asia
- Migrant Informality
- Subaltern Cosmopolitanism in Malaysia
- Ethnography of Transnational Migration
- Migrants and Refugees in the Global South
- Global cities of Asia and Migrant Workers
- Kongsi settlements of Kuala Lumpur and Penang
- Rohingya Communities in Malaysia
- Women and Transgendered Migrants in Malaysia
- Cosmopolitan ContamiNations
- Migrant Labour in Asia
Table of contents (6 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Parthiban Muniandy is a full-time faculty in Sociology and Faculty Director at Sarah Lawrence College for the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education, an initiative funded by the Mellon foundation. His areas of teaching and research expertise are in transnational migration & border studies, research methods, urban studies, and refugee studies. His first book, Politics of the Temporary: Ethnography of Migrant Life in Urban Malaysia, was published in 2014.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Ghost Lives of the Pendatang
Book Subtitle: Informality and Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia
Authors: Parthiban Muniandy
Series Title: Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6200-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-33-6199-7Published: 17 March 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-33-6202-4Published: 18 March 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-981-33-6200-0Published: 16 March 2021
Series ISSN: 2752-4310
Series E-ISSN: 2752-4329
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 177
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Political Science, Ethnography, Human Rights, Social Justice, Equality and Human Rights