Summary
Malaysian Muslim historian and social theorist whose The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) is one of the four texts of the Voyage in in Chapter Three, IV of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.272 / printed p.245).
Details
- Alatas’s book details how European colonialism created an object, the lazy native, who performed a crucial function in the calculations and advocacies of what Alatas calls colonial capitalism (PDF p.272-273 / printed p.245-246).
- One of the sharpest attacks in The Myth of the Lazy Native is against those Malaysians who continue to reproduce in their own thinking the colonial ideology that created and sustained the “lazy native” idea; residues of colonial capitalism remain in the thought of the newly autonomous Malays, confining them to the categories of “colonial capitalist thought” (PDF p.276 / printed p.249).
- Alatas documents how descriptions of the lazy native — based on the “false consciousness” of colonialists unwilling to accept that the natives’ refusal to work was one of the earliest forms of resistance to the European incursion — steadily acquire consistency, authority and the irrefutable immediacy of objective reality (PDF p.281 / printed p.254).
- Alatas is quoted: “Power falling into Dutch hands was different from power falling into the hands of an indigenous successor.” (PDF p.282 / printed p.255).
- Alatas’s work has had two aims: to establish a foundation for a post-colonial methodology of South Asian history and society, and to further the demystifying and deconstructive work suggested in The Myth of the Lazy Native (PDF p.282 / printed p.255).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Voyage in, Ranajit Guha, C. L. R. James, George Antonius