Disentangling Colonial Archives

Abstract

Theater buildings and theater policies are deeply interwoven in the histories of colonial societies. In the late nineteenth century, modern theater buildings became requisite facilities in the urban capitals across the world. The theater was not merely a purveyor of aesthetic ideas of modernity. As these buildings were physically and materially enmeshed in the daily lives of modern cities across the globe, they were instrumental in training and policing the urban citizens regarding the social practices of modernity. Colonial historiography typically narrates well-orchestrated statecraft. However, the colonial archives often reveal the imperial anxieties toward Indigenous communities and cultures. Thus, when local theater and performance cultures appear in the colonial archive, they mostly belong to those of the police, fire and sanitation departments—the colonial state's regulatory apparatuses. This chapter investigates the movement toward the standardization of fire safety and sanitization practices in the theaters of British Malaya in this period. Drawing from archival materials from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, the chapter examines the events that led to the promulgation of the Theatre Enactment of 1910, which subsumed the theater under the social sensory control of the police, fire safety and insurance offices.