Humanising the Squatter: Photography in the Service of Resettlement in Emergency-era Malaya

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which photography was used by the colonial state in Malaya to promote the supposed success of resettlement – the counterinsurgency scheme through which around half a million people were forcibly moved into camps, later renamed ‘New Villages’, during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). While this study engages with the ways in which the racialised category of the ‘squatter’ – that is, rural Chinese who were the main object of resettlement – was reflected in official photography, it also argues for the need to consider such photography within broader developments in photographic practice and consumption in Southeast Asia during the early 1950s. These include the role of local Malayan photographers as part of the state propaganda apparatus and the emergence of Humanist photojournalism as a mode of expression in the same period. In doing this, the article suggests that the interaction between colonial photography and commercial photojournalism in Malaya complicates the extant literature on the ‘colonial gaze’ while contributing to an emerging body of research on the tensions between colonialism and Humanism in early postwar photography.