Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia's Plantations

By Andrew C. Willford

"This is a timely study that engages directly with non-Malay sentiment about racial politics and development in a country that many see as becoming more polarised."
Tan Chee-Beng, Sun Yat-sen University

“Timely, authoratative and compelling…has no doubt set new standards for studying the everyday interactions of minority communities in their post-colonial societies and governments in Southeast Asia and beyond.”
Arunima Datta

"...the story of how economic dispossession becomes conjugated with ethnic and religious marginalisation is a timely one."

Sarah Besky, Brown University

"This is a brave, often brilliant book, with an incomparable set of insights to offer into the current state of ethnic politics in Malaysia. These insights are relevant to an analysis of all those places around the world where ethno-nationalism and religious revival are emerging in response to the failure of promised democratic inclusion."
Rosalind Morris

"An engaging, haunting, and deeply nuanced account of the force and caprice of law, the violence of order and erasure, and the exceedingly thin line between racialized developmentalism and ethnic cleansing. At once passionate, provocative, and disturbing, Andrew Willford's newest book is a most welcome addition to the ethnographic literature on everyday forms of violence and discrimination, postcolonial social suffering, and the Malaysian Indian experience in particular."
Michael G. Peletz

Andrew C. Willford is associate professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is also the author of Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia.