My first book project traces how working-class racial minorities who were largely illiterate and undocumented articulated claims to citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Australian Indian Ocean Territories from 1946 to the present. As ten discrete British colonies decolonized into these four polities, borders were in constant flux and itinerant people were increasingly made to seem out of place. Responding to adverse geopolitical conditions, many minorities were compelled to rely on creative, quasi-legal strategies to navigate state bureaucracies. In Malaysia, for instance, working-class Chinese and Indians, labeled “phony citizens” in the popular press, forged documents they had lost during the upheavals of World War II. Stateless Christian indigenous people in Borneo are widely known to have converted to Islam, Malaysia’s state religion, to make their citizenship applications more persuasive.

Such strategies were vital for navigating newly formed bureaucratic institutions, especially because bureaucrats stereotyped such mobile subjects as communist sympathizers and hence as potential subversives in the context of Cold War-era conflicts like the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960; 1968–1989) and the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation (1963–1966). Based on my doctoral dissertation, this book examines these bureaucratic encounters by combining the oral history interviews that I conducted with over 30 formerly stateless people with documents collected in 16 archives in five languages. I argue that ethnonationalism and anticommunism shaped citizenship claims-making processes in ways that thwarted the promises of freedom inherent in the transition from colonial subject to national citizen.