Colonial Trauma and Postcolonial Anxieties

Maureen Sioh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at DePaul University. She trained as a hydrologist and has worked in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and with First Nations communities in Canada. Her early research focussed on water quality. Concerned with the subjective process of how communities made decisions when confronting environmental issues, her research evolved to postcolonialism, and then to economics and psychoanalysis. She is the coauthor of Global Libidinal Economy with Ilan Kapoor, Gavin Fridell and Pieter de Vries.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, East Asia economic development was hailed as a miracle. Economists saw it as a model the world could follow: its visionary leadership, its egalitarian values and its future-oriented industrial strategy. For Maureen Sioh, this model has an underside, grounded in the legacies of colonial traumas. These traumas repeat themselves, producing a far more anxious and complex postcolonial legacy than most recognise or acknowledge. In this provocative and passionate book, Sioh brilliantly explores economic development as an ongoing struggle for survival and human dignity. In doing so, she addresses the core questions of global economic development: What are the lasting legacies of colonialism? How can we know what development is? Is economic development only about wealth generation?Steve Pile, Professor of Human Geography, The Open UniversityThis book is a tour de force, convincingly demonstrating that the psyche is not trivial or secondary but central to economic decision-making. Focusing on postcolonial Malaysia, Sioh brilliantly maps the wounds of trauma and anxiety in economic crisis and ‘miracle’.Ilan Kapoor, author of Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development and Professor of Critical Development Studies, York University, TorontoEconomic growth, development, progress … belying these self-evidently rational aspirations are unconscious drives for the repair and restitution of psychic wounds running deep within the postcolonial world. Exploring the libidinal economy of the Malaysian state, Sioh expertly brings into relief the anxieties and trauma that surreptitiously play out in the seemingly staid realm of economic policy. Haunted Choices is an important work, marking the beginning of a turn in political economy to the therapeutic.Earl Gammon, Senior Lecturer in Global Political Economy, University of Sussex

• 0.Introduction. 1.Colonial Trauma and Postcolonial Anxieties. 2.The Foundational Fantasy of Colonial Ecology. 3.Dismantling the Colonial Foundational Fantasy. 4.Trauma and the Wound of Race in the Malayan Emergency. 5.Anxiety and Pricing Race at Independence. 6.Postcolonial Anxieties and Performing Territorialization. 7.The Logic of Trauma in Financial Crisis. 8.Anxiety and Economic Policy in Resurgent East Asia. x.Conclusion