ASAA Women in Asia Series. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. x, 212 pp. (Illustrations.) US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-62922-5.
This is a persuasive and compelling book. It tells the commonplace story of ordinary young women and their experiences with schooling. But it becomes less ordinary when we learn that they actually have to micro-navigate a grand agenda of the nation through their daily lives. The grand agenda is Malaysia’s affirmative action program, or the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP’s purpose is to reverse the historical misfortunes of racial placements, narrow ethnic socio-economic inequality and create the ideal Malaysian citizenship, where only loyalty to the nation-state matters. Although not explicit in their consciousness, the female students who were the respondents in Joseph’s study seemed to have embraced, accommodated, negotiated, but also, circumvented the NEP.
The study is notable as it is a longitudinal ethnography which captures changes among the author’s respondents over a period of seven years. The first phase of the study was conducted in 2000 and the second phase was in 2006/2007.The book is also compelling because its subject of study is young women in their formative years, transiting from school to work to courtship and to marital life. By locating her study within this frame of reference, one is persuaded to engage with many theoretical and conceptual puzzles about the construction of subjectivity, or of the complex self: the gendered, ethnicized, nationalized, globalized and classified self.
The NEP’s implementation started in 1972. Joseph’s study of schoolgirls in a premier all-girls’ high school in Malaysia’s second largest city, Penang, was conducted some thirty years after this. Her conclusion seems unequivocal: the NEP has not only not succeeded in removing the identification of race with economic status, it may have even widened the differential socio-economic gap between ethnic groups.
Joseph classified her twenty-five or so respondents into various identifiable archetypes such as being “super achieving kiasu global women” to the “traditional young Malaysian women.” But they were mainly regarded as belonging to one or the other: the academically high-achieving girls or the academically low-achieving girls. In all this, Joseph explains how these young females circumnavigate the social, economic, and political spaces that are available for them. Traits and values such as competitiveness, as opposed to complacency and rebelliousness, distinguish one group of females against the other.
She documented cases of how some female students successfully strategized to outwit the social engineering obstacles of the NEP, while others ended up becoming the victims or collateral damage of the policy’s implementation. Her respondents employ varying strategies to deal with their material and social resources, or lack thereof. The ones who succeeded were also economically well off (mainly Chinese females). But Malays who got scholarships were also not necessarily the poorer ones. Indian females were the most disadvantaged. Having no recourse to state subsidy for tertiary education nor to the private business networks of the Chinese community, their post-schooling prospects were less bright. Indian females who do not excel academically will end up being the most deprived of the lot.
Although the book has many strengths there are a few shortcomings. For example, the first chapter on “Ethnicities in Colonial Malaya” could contain more description and data on the educational system from colonial Malaya and up to the present period. Since the focus of the study is a critique of the NEP, some macro-data on the professed achievement of the NEP, particularly through the projection of major social indicators such as schooling enrolments and occupational trends on the basis of ethnicity, could have also been included. This would provide a more general overview of the implementation of the NEP within the education sector.
The stratification and ethnicization of the education system which the author stresses may have also been unduly attributed to the present schooling system. However, this can be traced even further back from colonial times. Colonial policies created a segregated system which differentiated between the vernacular stream from the English stream of schooling. Although Joseph uses the context of postcoloniality in the transformation of schooling, more space should be devoted in discussing the implication of this colonial legacy. “Streaming” as a tool for allocation, division, and filtration, whether on the basis of language use (as in colonial days) or on the hierarchy of knowledge (science versus the arts stream), does have consequences in terms of self-worth and self-identification.
Joseph’s conclusion can be summarized this way: Chinese students excel because they have survival-competitive “cultural practices” (kiasu or “fear of losing”). They are supported by family resources that enable them to traverse the obstacles of the NEP and continue their higher studies overseas. These high achievers are akin to being the role model of success in a neo-liberal global economy. Some Malay students also succeed in being high achievers, but their countenance is one of passivity by using the benefits of the NEP in their pursuit of higher education. By and large Malay students predominate in the middle range of academic success. It seems that there are more Indian girls who are in the weaker academic category. They are also of the poorer socio-economic class. Furthermore, there seems to be a correlation between the cultural traits of liberalism and open-mindedness with higher academic attainment while the trait of “traditionalism” coincides with lower self-esteem and lower academic achievement. Schooling experiences in the study ultimately stratified and ethnicized identities, reinforcing the differences which were supposed to have been broken down by the NEP.
The narratives of young females making sense of their subjectivity within the schooling system disproves the success of the NEP or even the necessity for such a pervasive social engineering instrument to devalue the notion of race and its signifiers. Joseph’s study of young females within the schooling system strikes at the heart of the many questionings and critiques of the NEP.
Maznah Mohamad
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 721-723