Against Multiple Hegemonies: Radical Malay Women in Colonial Malaya

Abstract

This article seeks to redress the established scholarly boundaries that have thus far characterized Malaysian historiography through a detailed analysis of a Malay radical women's movement, the Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS). Although much has been written in the last few decades about Malay political activism during post World War II Malaya, radical female groups that emerged during those eventful years, and their efforts to carve autonomous spaces within emerging projects of national liberation has suffered from considerable neglect. By blending the use of colonial and vernacular sources to contextualize the activities of AWAS within the changing social and political landscapes of its time, this article shows that female radical activists in post World War II colonial Malaya were confronted with multiple hegemonies that worked to stifle their development. These hegemonies originated, first, from within their own society in the form of customary conventions and practices associated with class differences. AWAS also had to contend with censure and disciplinary actions from their male compatriots, who regarded them as threats to male dominance in radical politics. Finally, AWAS came under the watchful eye and proscriptive measures of the colonial state that sought to regain its control over its Asian subjects in an age of decolonization. The members of this radical collective struggled to overcome these hegemonies by drawing upon a whole array of relationships and connections to advance their cause, albeit with limited success. This article attempts to fill a gap in the literature on radical activism in colonial Malaya by reconstructing the history of a women's movement, the Angkatan Wanita Sedar (hereafter AWAS). Until recently, very little attention has been paid to the activities of this select group of Malay women who struggled alongside their male comrades at the height of decolonization in Southeast Asia. The reasons from such historiographical oversight may be found in the traditional conceptualization and presentation of Malaysian and Southeast Asian history. There has been a pervasive assumption among scholars that female radical activism was often overshadowed by the grander politics of independence in the postwar era—spearheaded as it was by charismatic men—who had consciously or unconsciously subsumed women's issues within the rubric and rhetoric of nationbuilding and liberation for all previously colonized peoples. In this formulation,