Andrew C. Willford. Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia's Plantations. Singapore: NUS Press, 2015, 336p.

Abstract

Tamils and Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia's Plantations Andrew C. Willford Singapore: NUS Press, 2015, 336p.In Tamils and Haunting of Justice, Andrew Willford explores questions of justice and retribution confronting Malaysian Tamils as they face eviction from their homes and demolition of their community structures in former plantation districts in Kuala Lumpur by real estate developers.With urban development becoming hugely more profitable than rubber plantations in Malaysia's inner city districts, owners sold their plantation lands to lucrative housing developments. But these were lands in which thousands of Tamil residents have lived since late nineteenth century, and where British companies in colonial Malaya built their community-based model of rubber plantation production. Even as Malay government razes community structures of Tamils-the schools, temples, churches, and community halls-it also views them as merely ex-laborers to be classified as squatters and evicted. Tamils feel compensation for their lands is insufficient and desire for their longtime presence as important for achieving justice.Willford's study of Tamil plantation workers shows them resisting resettlement before negotiating compensation with notions of compensatory justice grounded in a desire for recognition. In attempts to prevent demolition of their temples and community buildings and the erasure of their associated memories, historiographic recognition becomes a kind of compensatory justice (p. 5).A key argument of book is that transformation of land usage in Malaysia cannot be separated from its inextricable links to religious-ethnic politics in nation-building, and deliberately measured politicizing of Islam and Malay rights. The book makes substantive and lengthy use of French philosopher Derrida's work to show that as a sense of victimization takes hold of an aggrieved minority, Malaysian Tamils, force of law that marks and sustains such dissonance becomes more visible, indeed deconstructible (p. 8). For Derrida, logic of is an important way of understanding justice (O'Riley 2007, 18). The spectral or haunting presence of past events, in this case demolition of Tamil ancestral lands and religious structures, disrupts and brings into question present history and events.Willford's extensive citing of Derrida's work forms essential strands of book's critique of Malaysian ethnic nationalism, racialized landscape within which these events unfold, and how seeking of justice by Tamils goes outside and beyond juristic or civil order, and even exceeds reason or logic to cross over into divine or sublime.The Tamil Sense of Cultural Historicity and JusticeBased on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in plantation areas between 2003 and 2009, Willford shows how ideas of race and ethnicity are produced, imagined, and negated within a political, material, legal, and discursive field. As they struggle for compensation and ultimately justice, book portrays sense of hurt and betrayal felt by Tamils as they are labeled as squatters despite their long community presence in area.The Tamil sense of justice goes beyond law. The strength of study is showing how notions of justice as imagined by marginalized and betrayed Tamils complicate legal demarcations of ethnic differences in post-colonial states (p. 6).The book provides a critique of development ideology of state, with its quite implicit cultural, nationalist, ethnic, and religious face. Malaysia's development politics have forced dramatic shifts in ethnic composition of Malaysia's industrial heartland, which as Willford notes intended goal all along (p. 34). As Willford says: To develop nation's core identity, politically constructed around Malay ethnicity and Islam, two being increasingly synonymous, Malays, it was argued, had to be united and strong-particularly at center (p. …