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Malaysia. The Malays . By Anthony Milner. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008 (hard cover) and 2011 (soft cover). Pp. xiii + 293. Bibliography, Index.

The Malays — a volume in Wiley-Blackwell’s series ‘The peoples of South-East Asia and the Pacific’ — is an absorbing read, clearly written not only for those already interested in the cultural dynamics of the island world of Southeast Asia, but also for everyone who is interested in knowing how to successfully fail in defining a particular race, people or ethnicity. ‘In particular I ponder the issue of who are “the Malays” and ask how they became “Malay” and what it means to be a “Malay”,’ Anthony Milner writes in the Preface. ‘One thing that has intrigued me in particular is the often stated “Malay” anxiety about a lack of permanence— a fear sometimes expressed in terms of an emphatic denial that “the Malays will disappear from this world”’ (p. xi). The Malays tells its readers everything we always wanted to know about the Malays in terms of beginnings, transformations and present-day situations, Malay (Melayu) being a many-faceted, multilayered term which, if anything, refers to many phenomena at once — and why would Melayu ever disappear from this world?