Abstract
Instead of privileging the largescale and the abstract, From World City to the World in One City studies a Malay club in Liverpool. Rather than exploring it in isolation, Tim Bunnell expands his investigation into larger structures, historical processes and the Malay community in Liverpool that established the club. He maps out the larger Malay world – the world of sailing, Empire and neoliberalism – using the club as an entry point, while at the same time contextualising the club, Liverpool and the city’s Malay community in relation to these, investigating the worlding of the club.
The original Malay Club on St. James Road, set up by Johan Awang who had moved from New York, is long gone. The building was demolished in the early 1960s but the institution persisted. Its second home at 7 Jermyn Street, continued – until 2007 – to anchor the Malay worlds in post-maritime, post-imperial Liverpool, long after the sea farers such as Dol who formed it stopped working at sea.
The book employs a range of concepts, such as ‘downscaled cities’, to understand other places, spaces and networks. The groundedness of the study is particularly appealing to this reviewer, especially how it employs the Malay Club as an entry point to explore world-spanning historical and spatial interrelations and to exemplify the historical (transtemporal) and external (transnational, translocal) connections of this extraordinary urban place.
The study builds knowledge of and from the community, well adapting the intellectual tools crucial for such research: focus, framework, vantage point and methodology. Bunnell not only studies the club and the Malay community through fieldwork, but takes ‘ordinary’ people and places seriously as both subjects and objects of urban research without othering or exoticising them. Instead of letting the information turn into data in external frameworks, he also employs local sensibilities to interpret them.
The book represents a long-term and highly invested study that connects Liverpool, the main city of Bunnell’s home region, and the Malay World where he lives and conducts research. He shares his own transformation: ‘I became less concerned with attempting to direct conversation and correspondingly more content to collect fragments of life histories and geographies that emerged from the regular flow of chatting and storytelling at the Malay Club’ (p. 16).
As he became more familiar with local people and more conversant of the power of local stories, and learned that the seafarers focus more on their lives at sea, Bunnell drew his attention to their personal stories. He diversified the informant base from elderly sailors to include local Malay families, paying attention to individuals and adopting travellers’ accounts as archival information. The author uses Malay words, used by local people such as Mohamed Ben Ibrahim, without letting the meanings get lost in translation. This provides room in his text for the voices of informants, and communicates with Malay researchers.
Bunnell sees how the Malays managed their transformation (or hybridisation) in Liverpool. Concerning the Westernisation of daughters, mothers would ask them to be conservative when the fathers were home and to hide their legs with newspapers in the presence of Malay men. Rebellious Joan who cut her hair and wore short dresses was advised by her mother to ‘white lie’ and tell the father that this cosmetic de-Malayanisation was for safety at work. The strictness that accompanied the father’s return home tended to offset the excitement of gifts. His going away could bring relief and the return of some freedoms at home.
The transnationalising of seafaring Malay lives was undertaken by the inscription of national boundaries across maritime social webs connecting Liverpool and the alam Melayu. Sailing too dwindled by the 1970s, but the flow of Malays continued due to the Malaysian state sending hundreds of young Malays to Britain for studies. Abdul Rahim Daud often visited the club to soften homesickness. As the photographs suggest, showing alcohol on tables, the club’s visitors have engaged in much of the British host culture, perhaps except for the consumption of pork.
The Malaysian national approach to being Malay changed with Mahathir Mohamed gaining more power (he became Prime Minister in 1981). His ‘Look East’ policy simultaneously caricatured the West as suffering irreversible decline and a ‘perversion’ of values. Yet the emergent Malay capitalist class looked to acquire Western commodities like the English language, internationally recognised MBAs and global tastes in food and clothing, marking the Malayu Baru (the modern Malays) as a ‘global’ class. Looking beyond how they reproduced essentialist views, particularly of religious belief systems, Bunnell places importance on how these ideas are lived and the spaces constructed for them.
Overall, the book focuses on three main themes: The first concerns various spatial networks, webs and wider geographies of connection. Here the complex and intertwined social webs of Liverpool are juxtaposed with Malay social webs spun in the late-colonial times which exceeded earlier political-economic linkages, preceded globalisation and outlived the imperial world city Liverpool. Second, investigating the grounding of these transnational social webs and networks, Bunnell demonstrates how the Malay Club operated as the site of Malay-ness in Liverpool, and exposes its translocal connections to the Malay world in Southeast Asia. Third, considering the people he met at 7 Jermyn Street as a lived archive of memory, the author draws attention to relational urban geographies derived from lives lived in actual places.
It would have been useful if the author had highlighted how this study questions economic and other mainstream views and determinisms, and how the inside-out investigation of a particular place/space provides intellectual tools useful for other places, thus pushing the boundary of contemporary knowledge a bit more. This concern notwithstanding, the book is both informative and provides deep and complex insights.