Surreal Estates: Managing Risk and Investment in the Malay(si)an Extraction Zone

Speaker(s): Alfonse Chiu
Duration: 20 min

How do colonial narratives, extractive infrastructures, and labor regimes shape our relationship to land? Through an exploration of colonial and contemporary Malaysia, Alfonse Chiu examines the connections between extraction, property, race, and capital in plantation territories.

Taking Pulau Carey, an island southwest of Kuala Lumpur transformed by more than a century of agricultural exploitation, as a point of departure, this presentation traces how British colonial logics organized land, labor, and populations in the service of capitalist accumulation. From nineteenth-century tin mines to rubber plantations, and from colonial land policies to contemporary real estate and port development projects, it highlights the continuities between the imperial past and the extractive present.

Drawing on archival materials, historical narratives, and a reflection on the imaginaries of risk and investment, Alfonse Chiu investigates the construction of racial categories, the histories of coerced labor migration, and the ideological mechanisms that enabled the secure circulation of goods, capital, and labor. The plantation emerges as a “mythological machine”, where territory, violence, memory, and speculation become deeply intertwined.