The present chapter, I believe, is one of the few attempts in the field of Malaysian studies, especially in the sub-field of ethnic relations in Malaysia, to make a comparison as to how Malay and Chinese ethnic identities have been formed in the Malaysian context, both from authority-defined (read: texts) and everyday-defined (read: memories) perspectives. The novelty of this attempt perhaps lies in the fact that it is viewed from the objective and subjective perspective of a Malay person, namely, the author. It goes without saying that the chapter is also an invitation for a critical discourse on the theme, which to this very moment has been a source of continued contestation both in the academia and the realpolitik contexts in Malaysia. I am referring to the hot public debate being conducted in the mass media in Malaysia at present on the issue of the teaching of Mathematics and Science in English in Chinese- and Malay-medium schools.

In the first part of this chapter, and in the subsequent second and third parts, I shall present an authority-defined perspective of the construction of the social categories “Malay” and “Malayness”, as well as “Chinese” and “Chineseness”. The discussion emphasizes the defining role that British colonialism had played, in particular, through its “colonial knowledge”, in the construction and consolidation process of these categories, hence identities. I contend that colonial conquest was not just the result of the power of superior arms, military organization, political power, or economic wealth. It was also the result of a cultural invasion in the form of a conquest of the native epistemological space, or the dismantling of native thought system hence disempowering it of its ability to define things and subsequently replacing it with a foreign one, through a systemic application of a series of colonial investigative modalities.

As a result, I would further argue that the history of the much discussed contemporary Malay identity and Malayness as well as Chinese identity and Chineseness, which is largely a colonial-orientalist construction in the Malaysian case, reflects the identity of the overall history of Malaya and then Malaysia, one that was dominated, shaped, and “factualized”, culturally, by colonial knowledge.