Resettling the Colonial Lens: Photography and the (re)making of Malaysia's New Villages

Photography was a key medium through which the British colonial state sought to document the Malayan Emergency (1948-60). This was particularly so for resettlement. Under this counterinsurgency scheme, almost half a million rural residents of colonial Malaya, most of them of Chinese ancestry, were forcibly moved into hundreds of resettlement camps - later re-labelled 'New Villages' (NVs) - in an attempt to undermine support for the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). However, resettlement in late-colonial Malaya has been largely overlooked in the now vast critical literature on the relationship between photography and colonialism. Concurrently, photography has been underemphasised in many 'post-revisionist' studies of the Malayan Emergency, even though the collection and reproduction of colonial-era images, and the emergence of new photographic practices, are key components of community-led re-assessments of resettlement in Malaysia today.

'Resettling the Colonial Lens' is a multidisciplinary and transnational project which aims to fill these gaps in the literature by asking the following core research question: what role has photography as a medium played in documenting, critiquing and re-writing the history of resettlement in late-colonial Malaya?

The Project will address this question by:

Studying the production and circulation of photography during the process of resettlement (thereby uncovering the role played by Malay(si)ans who worked in the 1950s as official, commercial and/or amateur photographers);
Collecting, evaluating and making accessible the large body of photography that was produced to document, promote and/or undermine resettlement;
Critically examining the diverse ways in which people in Malay(si)a have distributed, consumed and interpreted photographs of the NVs;
Understanding how new photographic practices (e.g. the collection of photographs by institutions and private collectors; the re-use of 'official' photographs in new contexts, etc.) have emerged as a means through which local communities are confronting histories of resettlement today.
'Resettling the Colonial Lens' represents a case of decolonising historical photographic research in action. This is evident in the make-up of the Project's international team, as well its underlying aim of bringing NV residents themselves back into discussions about the photography of resettlement. In its historical and contemporary focus, the Project will give agency to Malay(si)an photographers and New Villagers, thus make a lasting contribution to current efforts by Malaysian communities to re-interpret the history and celebrate the cultural heritage of the NVs.

At the same time, the Project responds to an emerging public discourse in the UK on the international legacies of colonial violence. By unlocking and critically interpreting the 'colonial photographic archive' (including that housed in institutions such as The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum - both of which hold significant amount of 'resettlement photography' across a range of collections - as well as that housed in archives in Singapore and the US), this Project will enable UK institutions - and the wider British public - to appreciate the often overlooked afterlives of colonialism in Southeast Asia today