Indigenous Foreigners”: Racial Capitalism and the Making of the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar

Details

Collection: SEADL Undergraduate Paper Award
Title: “Indigenous Foreigners”: Racial Capitalism and the Making of the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar
Author: Wikstrom, Eleanor Villafranca
Resource Type: text
Date Created: 2022-05-10
Extent: 20 pages
Note(s): Recognizing the failure of most popular and scholarly accounts to historicize the 2016-17 outbreak of violence against the Rohingya ethnic minority in Myanmar, this paper examines the colonial origins of the conflict. In particular, this paper employs Cedric Robinson's theory of racial capitalism to analyze archives of the ethno-racial classification of colonial subjects in British Burma, ultimately demonstrating that modern ethnic division in Myanmar is substantially derived from colonial-era British racialism that served to legitimize the dispossession of colonized subjects and the maintenance of a cheap imported labor regime. In doing so, this paper offers a potential source of illumination as to why the Rohingya conflict has intensified rather than dissipated under the regime of modern capitalism and the influence of companies like Facebook
This paper was selected as the second place winner for the 2023 Southeast Asia Digital Library Undergradate Paper Award
Language: English
Topic: Imperialism
Rohingya (Burmese people)
Subject: Imperialism
Rohingya (Burmese people)
Burma