Jack Jin Gary Lee - "Feeling 'Sayang': On Racialized Emotions and their Minor Articulations in Colonial Singapore"

In 1938, colonial officials in Singapore and London were fixated on the fate of a magistrate R, who was suspected of homosexual relations with colonial subjects. To them, his case was an ominous sign of things to come, as other high-ranking male officials and elites were also implicated in what the Colonial Office later called the “Malayan ‘sexual perversion’ cases.” Same-sex activities between European men and the colonized formed part of the irreducible, but repressed, underlives of the modern British empire: in practice, colonial domination fostered unequal, wayward intimacies – what I call “minor articulations” – that unsettled the performance of racialized authority. Tracing the affective ties that social actors form, I draw on a declassified file on R’s disciplinary hearing and delve into the pivotal testimonies of the local witnesses who spoke about or against him. Conceptualizing minor articulations as ambivalent feelings and cross-cutting relations that belie the representations and structures of colonial rule, this article offers a counter-history to demonstrate how researchers might re-orient themselves toward the workings of minor articulations at the margins.