Race Manifest: Colonial Administration and Racialisation in Nusantara

Race Manifest: Colonial Administration and Racialisation in Nusantara traces themes in the history of racialisation in Nusantara through colonial sciences, racism, and displacement of self during the long centuries of subjugation in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Imperial powers had long stood on the grounds of race to promote and justify colonialism, but interactions between them created a new understanding of 'race' in Nusantara, a place of imagined and loose unity.

Race is conceptualised in this book as a binding entity to which colonial interests and modus operandi were formed, as an idea of human differences that were scientifically validated and socially acceptable—at least for those with power. The approach to identify and perpetuate racial types, or racialisation has undermined self-identities and collective histories in Nusantara. The region was at one point a geographical and cultural unit that celebrated the individualities of local kingdoms and their traditions, but were also recognized as having threads of continuities in language and culture, in politics and trade but this has fallen under the shadow of new knowledge and administration of various Western imperial rule.