This webinar examines the history of RIDA’s national ‘kampong leaders’ programme, a series of experimental home economics classes for rural Malay women in Peninsular Malaya. The programme was a site of Cold War debates aimed to reform domestic labour and produce a new class of developmental leaders in Malay kampungs. In design and implementation, experts of Malayan decolonisation, UNFAO technical expertise, and Malay vernacular knowledge were involved in projects of translation that sought to consolidate state and vernacular ways of knowing and managing the home. Their attempts to reconcile different ideas of progress and rural economies were beset by troubles of language and sentiment, as educating rural Malay women required producing new Malay terms and applying home economic knowledge to vernacular morality, concerns, and desires.
Throughout the programme, officials and participants argued, negotiated, and danced around responsibilities in relation to different conceptions of kemajuan and ketinggalan: sentiments about racial improvement rooted in anxieties that located rural women as sources of impoverishment and subjects of intervention. Bureaucratic politics in designing the curriculum meanwhile led to unclear goals and institutional hierarchies, revealing frictions between Malayan racial categories and global models of village improvement in the question of Malayan rural development.
Speaker:
Chin Kar Yern is an MPhil student in World History at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. His works have been published in Modern Asian Studies and Indonesia and the Malay World. He is also the author of Modern Pangs: The Politics of Food and Hunger after Merdeka, 1957–1969. He is currently investigating the historical processes of RIDA’s rural developmental visual culture under a research grant by Harvard University’s Center for History and Economics. Kar Yern is also a member of Malaysia Design Archive, an independent archive of Malaysia’s visual culture, where he supports community talks and archival programmes.
Moderator / Discussants:
1) Christopher Choong Weng Wai is Associate Director of Research at the Khazanah Research Institute (KRI). He is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity at the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. In recognition of his academic and professional achievements, he is appointed as Adjunct Associate Professor with the Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development, Sunway University.
2) Nur Adilla is a PhD candidate in International Studies at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University in Tokyo where her research centers on the relations between social movements and gender. She holds an MA in Gender Studies from Universiti Malaya, Malaysia.
