In this talk, I offer a critical reading of this social institution by engaging with its present-day conundrum – SBPs serve as a national infrastructure of Malay elite capture, exclusion and class reproduction despite its initial impetus for social advancement. I begin with particular observations of extraction from the empirical site of my long-standing ethnographic work in the heartlands of the Malaysian east coast. From there, in order to better locate the mission drift of such institutions more broadly, I turn to the ghosts of its colonial history and architecture in Malaya. In particular, I pay close attention to the foundation of the Malay College Kuala Kangsar together with its cultural and economic heritage to mount a preliminary theorisation of “Malayness and/as whiteness”. Such an unacknowledged formulation, I argue, preserves patterns of hegemony by native elites (mis)understood as “decolonisation”. Instead, I offer an emancipatory reading of what it means to decolonise education in Malaysia, drawing on scholarship in decolonial studies and abolition geography.
Period
4 Feb 2026
Event title
Decolonising Meanings in Malaysian Architectural History and Heritage