Raced-Gendered Capitalism in Malaysia

Raced-Gendered Capitalism in Malaysia explores how the international and the everyday interact in constituting and sustaining the developmental state in Malaysia as a specific form of raced-gendered capitalism. Juxtaposed with a methodological nationalist, male-elitist, and “plan rational” conception, it provides a reading of the developmental state in Malaysia as a raced-gendered capitalist project navigating the international dynamics of the colonial-imperial capitalist world-system.

The book draws out the everyday lives, labour, and households of non-elite Malay women as central to the processes and politics of raced capitalist reproduction. First, it reconstructs state-institutional accounts of raced capitalism in Malaysia to incorporate the gendered lives and labour of households. Then, by embracing oral history as a feminist method, it offers a reinterpretation of the racialised developmental state project through the textured rhythms of Malay women’s everyday lives. The book advances an empirical account that foregrounds gender in more foundational ways to understand raced capitalist development on the periphery of the global economy.

By bringing feminist International Political Economy into closer dialogue with the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), Raced-Gendered Capitalism in Malaysia engages students, academics and researchers interested in critical feminist approaches that centre the Global South as a paradigm for contesting Eurocentric accounts of global-racial capitalism.