Darren Wan

Overview

I am a social and legal historian of Southeast Asia. My research centers perspectives from the margins of state power to reconceptualize the political event and legal category of decolonization.

My dissertation examines how the reconstitution of ten discretely administered British colonies into Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Australian Indian Ocean Territories was experienced in the everyday. Entitled Doubtful Claims, Dubious Loyalties: Citizenship, Anticommunism, and the Decolonization of British Southeast Asia, the project traces how working-class racial minorities who were largely illiterate and undocumented articulated claims to citizenship in these four polities from 1946 to the present. Responding to adverse geopolitical conditions, many minorities were compelled to rely on creative, quasi-legal strategies—ranging from religious conversion to document forgery—to navigate newly established state bureaucracies. Through research in five languages that combines oral history interviews that I conducted and documents collected in 16 archives, I argue that ethnonationalism and anticommunism thwarted the promises of freedom inherent in the transition from colonial subject to national citizen. 

My research is supported by the Social Science Research Councils of the U.S. and Singapore, the American Historical Association, as well as through internal grants like the Einaudi Center's Amit Bhatia '01 Global PhD Research Award.

You can learn more about my work at my personal website.

Committee: Eric Tagliacozzo & Durba Ghosh (co-advisors), Natasha Raheja, Sunil Amrith