The Hollow Within: anxiety and performing postcolonial financial policies

摘要

In 1997-98 East and Southeast Asia experienced a region-wide financial crisis that saw national currencies lose 75 per cent of their value and stock markets wiped out. The financial crisis became an antagonistic and racialised referendum on Asian values between certain Asian governments and their Western critics. What was the larger political significance of this focus on Asian values? Focusing on the Malaysian government's controversial decision to go against the international financial community by implementing capital controls during the crisis, I argue that the debate over Asian values can be understood as performances to challenge and psychologically defend the conventional hierarchy of international relations that followed its symbolic disruption through the economic success of the regional economies before the crisis.