ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the power politics around the notions of ethnicity, class and modernity, are played out in the urban terrain and actively helping to reconstitute the modem Malaysian city. It interprets Malaysian modernity as part of its broader contemporary political, social and cultural transformation. The chapter explains the tensions around the re-conceptualisation of Malayness, class and the Malaysian nation-state to show the centrality of these processes in characterizing contemporary Malaysian society. It suggests that the contests around the changing notions of nation, Malayness and class are central sites for the rethinking of Malaysian modernity and ideas of the modem. The chapter argues that the new social and cultural subjectivities and the spatial transformations in contemporary Malaysia can be understood not so much in terms of the logic of capitalism but rather by looking at how people struggle to derive power, wealth and cultural status from their positions in the changing Malaysian State.
