Specters of excess: Passing and policing in the Malay-speaking archipelago

Abstract

Positioned at the island interface of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the east Malaysian state of Sabah bears witness to some of the largest clandestine cross-border flows across the globe. This article examines what a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah has called “an insidious problem which has turned out to be an all-consuming nightmare.” It highlights the situated (meta)semiotic work involved in determining and enforcing the state's seemingly indeterminate and unenforceable borders between citizens and suspected non-citizens, while also showing how inquiries into migrant illegality are ultimately inquiries into “excess.” It demonstrates how experiences of and orientations to excess take expressive shape in migrants and Malaysians' fashions of speaking and forms of life. It concludes by considering how these transnational dynamics across a sprawling archipelagic region lend a provincializing angle of vision on American(ist) anthropology's own hemispheric parochialism.