This timely, sensitive ethnography describes the transformation – amounting to the near-disappearance – of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighbourhoods of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Brickfields today is contiguous with and increasingly swallowed up by the vast development of KL Sentral, where Kuala Lumpur's workers and visitors, local and commuter trains, shopping malls, luxury hotels and modern corporate headquarters converge. Baxstrom's book concerns the people who live and work in Brickfields who approve of the government's modernization plans but are shocked by its monolithic exclusions, which make the actions of the state seem indeterminate and unjust. Baxstrom finds a precedent for the state's pre-emptive movement of people in the Malayan ‘Emergency’ (1948–60), when, to control insurgent anti-British forces and Communists, nearly 500,000 Malayans (mostly Chinese) were relocated into ‘New Villages’.
KL Sentral is a short distance from the colonial-era train station – a majestic colonial monument in the ‘Saracenic’ style favoured by the British as they remade Malaya and relocated its seat of state government from Klang to Kuala Lumpur in the 1880s. Frank Swettenham, who was to become resident general of the Federated Malay States, envisioned a KL built in a manner consistent with the grandeur of Her Majesty's Government. His plans dovetailed serendipitously with a manufacturing venture of Yap Ah Loy, the ‘Captain China’ of Kuala Lumpur, who sought to employ his former tin miners (the tin market had collapsed in 1876) in a new brickfield. While Yap's plans to export bricks to the booming colonial city of Singapore failed, the presence of fifteen brick kilns in the area that became known as ‘Brickfields’ allowed Swettenham to realize his vision. In Brickfields, the new colonial railway, built by Indian Tamils, entered Kuala Lumpur. These Tamil workers and the more elite, English-speaking Ceylonese Tamil railway clerks and lower-level bureaucrats moved to Brickfields. Since the late nineteenth century, Brickfields has been identified as an ‘Indian’ community, a designation made official by the colonial government, which favoured in Malaya well-defined ‘racial’ communities as part of a system of social control.
Today, Brickfields reflects Malaysian multiethnicity, where Indian, Malay (Muslim) and Chinese Malaysians live somewhat uneasily in a context where Islam has become the ‘primary moral justification for rule’. Building on Lefebvre's notion of ‘right to the city’, Baxstrom focuses mostly on the Indian Tamil population of Brickfields who, he argues, have lost the right to inhabit and initiate change in everyday urban spaces; they are literally and figuratively ungrounded. Brickfields’ buildings, in the words of one of Baxstrom's respondents, are moving before their disbelieving eyes. ‘Believing’ in norms and predictable experiences, a stabilizing process described by Deleuze that creates links between the ‘self’ – that is, one's sensory-motor perception and thoughts – and the ‘world’, figures significantly in Baxstrom's discussion; he argues that interrogating the experience of belief allows us to look beyond the overworked dialectic of oppression and resistance.
Sometimes Baxstrom's engagement with theory seems to dwarf the everyday experiences and voices of Brickfields residents. His description of how and why Brickfields residents mobilize for identity formation three ‘different figures of personhood’ or three ‘abstract images of thought’ – the stranger, counterfeiter and gangster – almost has the effect of turning Brickfields residents into the very abstractions he claims characterizes their indeterminate and ruptured lives. Indeed, in many respects, this ethnography could be more grounded within the history and economy of Malaysia and less in theory. From reading this book, one gets the sense that the Brickfields experience is unique except for the mass relocation of people during the Malayan Emergency. Yet, at the same time that KL Sentral was being planned, so, too, was KL's ‘Vision City’, which would rehabilitate and develop the ‘backwards’ Malay Muslim (and possibly Islamist) stronghold of Kampung Baru, just a few stops on the light rail from KL Sentral. In the shadow of the Petronas Towers, this neighbourhood, like Brickfields, had its origins in colonial racialized urban planning and stands in the way of what Baxstrom calls the state's ‘techno-rational’ and Islamic vision. Absent, too, is a discussion of the complex consequences of class and its marginalizations within the larger Tamil community; we only get hints of the earlier departure of middle-class Tamils from Brickfields and divisions between Ceylonese and Indian versions of Hindu religious practice, but intra-ethnic dispossession does not figure in Baxstrom's narrative.
In the final chapter, Baxstrom moves from the Brickfields residents’ loss of ‘belief’ in the Deleuzean sense to the omnipresence of Islamic belief as the basis for governance in Malaysia. He suggests, counter-intuitively, that statist Islam, rather than narrowing the space for Hindu practice, has actually widened it for a subset of temple-worshippers in Brickfields; while houses and buildings may have moved, three temples have paradoxically remained. An explanation for why these three temples still stand in Brickfields (while 30 other were knocked down elsewhere during his research) pivots on his claim that these temple leaders’ reformist goals reflected the state's own goal of calibrating Islamic practice to a vision of capitalist modernity. However, he does not demonstrate how the other temples that were ‘cleansed’ – to use the local term for demolishing Hindu temples that the state claims illegally occupy Malaysian land – failed to measure up to the state's expectations.
The questions Baxstrom asks about Brickfields lives and the disappearance of buildings, temples, ethical convictions and notions of rights are crucial ones which compel us to look beyond Brickfields to the larger ethnoreligious experience of Hindus in Malaysia. Recently, after a ‘temple cleansing’ in Kuala Lumpur, the Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) emerged as a powerful rallying voice against Hindu oppression in Malaysia. Not only did a rapidly politicized Hindu community now speak out against their diminishing ‘right to the city’, they made the larger claim of their loss of human rights. Unlike Brickfields residents who were shattered by dislocation, finding it impossible to form ‘an image of the world that allowed for action within horizons of possible meaning’ (p. 221), by 2007, many Malaysian Hindus were taking action into their own hands, demanding that their belief in an ethical and just world be realized.
