Organizer: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University
Type/Location: In Person / New Haven, CT
Description:
In 1938, colonial officials in Singapore and London were fixated on the fate of a magistrate R, who was suspected of homosexual relations with colonial subjects. To them, his case was an ominous sign of things to come, as other high-ranking male officials and elites were also implicated in what the Colonial Office later called the “Malayan ‘sexual perversion’ cases.” Same-sex activities between European men and the colonized formed part of the irreducible, but repressed, underlives of the modern British empire: in practice, colonial domination fostered unequal, wayward intimacies – what I call “minor articulations” – that unsettled the performance of racialized authority. Tracing the affective ties that social actors form, I draw on a declassified file on R’s disciplinary hearing and delve into the pivotal testimonies of the local witnesses who spoke about or against him. Conceptualizing minor articulations as ambivalent feelings and cross-cutting relations that belie the representations and structures of colonial rule, this article offers a counter-history to demonstrate how researchers might re-orient themselves toward the workings of minor articulations at the margins.
About the Speaker:
Jack Jin Gary Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. Gary's scholarship explores how race and law shape the social logics and processes of governance in modern empires and (post)colonial states. He is working on a book, Inventing Direct Rule, on the significance of law and race in the making of "direct rule" in the modern British Empire. Focusing on the reconstitution of Jamaica and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang and Malacca) as Crown Colonies in the nineteenth century, this project examines the structures, practices, and mythologies of "direct rule" in relation to colonies marked as "plural societies."
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