After the Malay Dilemma: The Modern Malay Subject and Cultural Logics of "National Cosmopolitanism" in Malaysia‪.‬

Introduction Mobility is the great story of capitalist modernity. What this story tells is the epic movements of trade, peoples, cultures, and capital across the globe, movements that are greatly intensified in the contemporary "postmodern conditions". Accompanying these movements is mobility of another kind: a fluid and progressive sensibility eager to strike against established relations and cultural norm, one that impels a person "to move, to change, and to invent" (Asad 1993, p. 11). These innovative qualities are something of the modern subject. The key to the modern subject is empathy--or as I shall prefer to call it, cosmopolitanism--which takes a person beyond her primary identifications and view social situations from another cultural and communal perspective (Asad 1993, p. 11). The two kinds of mobility--one social and material, one subjective and personal--are closely intertwined if not causally related. One feeds on the other to produce that transformative work for which capitalism is renown. For the authors of The Communist Manifesto, the massive "cosmopolitan character in production and consumption in every country" (Marx and Engels 1959, p. 17) is invariably tied in with cultural and intellectual processes: