Abstract
Tim Bunnell’s elegant book, From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool through Malay Lives, focuses on what the author calls the ‘life geographies’ of Malay ex-seamen who once worked for Liverpool’s famed Blue Funnel Line and who are now the elderly members of the Liverpool Malay community. Colonial seamen such as these formed the backbone of Britain’s maritime empire. The success of From World City to World in One City owes to its careful historical and cultural contextualization of these men’s lives not only as seamen but also as migrants, as British citizens, as Liverpool residents, as ethnic/racial subjects, and as diasporic sojourners. The term ‘life geographies’ captures the importance of both mobility and settlement among these men and, just as significantly, of connection and relation among the places within which their lives have unfolded.
This study hinges as much on what could be called ‘place biographies’ as on life geographies. At every turn, Bunnell shows how these men’s various positionalities shape and are shaped by places: 7 Jermyn Street, the location of the first Malay Club; Liverpool 8 (the city’s multiracial neighborhood); Kirkby, a neighborhood on the city’s outskirts to which Malay/British families either migrated or were dispersed as part of racially motivated urban policy; the various ports, especially New York City, which make up ‘the Malay Atlantic’; and various locales within these men’s original homelands, now the nation-states of Malaysia and Singapore, where aging Liverpool Malays only began visiting several decades after having left. Bunnell shows how the trajectories of these men’s lives and those of their families are connected to the fates – the life and death – of such places. Liverpool itself is the chief example here. Once a world city and ‘gateway of Empire’, it has long been economically depressed, owing mostly to the decline of shipping. And herein lies an ironic twist of historical fate: Liverpool’s descent coincided with the spectacular rise of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, as a center of economic prosperity and cosmopolitanism within Southeast Asia. A poignant moment in the text occurs when Bunnell visits an ex-seaman to interview him some more about mid-20th century maritime routes. But his friend is distracted. He is more concerned to have Bunnell join him in watching a video about the dazzling, global city of Kuala Lumpur.
A number of the book’s virtues can be gleaned from this single ethnographic moment. First, the narrative highlights and manages multiple temporalities. The research was conducted periodically in the early 2000s and for a 6-month period in 2006. The text reads somewhat as an historical account, but ethnography is woven throughout the narrative in order to situate the significance of the past within the present. Likewise, places come to represent these temporalities: Malaysia and Singapore – the world’s busiest port in the 1990s – are the future. One Malay person wryly commented about Britain that ‘This country’s finished’ (p. 156). A second, related virtue exemplified by the video incident is methodological in nature. Bunnell is doing history, ethnography, and geography. His mission is to document and theorize ex-colonial seamen’s worlds, as lived and understood by them. But the elderly men who are the source of this important material are not the most willing research subjects. Many of them do not care to be interviewed at all, much less in depth. Bunnell thus attends importantly to the discrepancy between his own passions as a researcher, ever in search of more details, and those of his interlocuters, whose hearts (never mind memories) are not focused on the Liverpool of old.
In situating Malay lives within broader political economic, cultural, and national histories – again, across times and spaces – Bunnell has created a text that will be useful for those interested in transnational phenomena that predate globalization as we know it today. His beautifully rendered moving ethnography will also be of interest to scholars concerned with the contemporary politics of ethnicity and multiculturalism, especially as they are marshaled in a capitalistic vein to create value for a city that once profoundly underestimated colored seamen’s worth.