5 Questions with Ee Ling Quah
Ee Ling Quah is Associate Professor, Culture & Society at Western Sydney University, Australia.
She is the author of Fire Dragon Feminism: Asian Migrant Women’s Tales of Migration, Coloniality and Racial Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2025), Transnational Divorce: Understanding Intimacies and Inequalities from Singapore (2020) and Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore (2015).
No.1
Your first two books focused on divorce and marital dissolutions in Singapore (and transnationally). This new book, Fire Dragon Feminism, discusses Asian migrant women’s encounters with coloniality and racial capitalism at their workplace and everyday life—what resulted in this turn?
Thank you for mentioning my first two books on divorce and transnational divorce. I love that you asked me this question as it made me think about these three major projects that I have worked on. The overarching theme across the three books centres on interrogating unequal power structures. While the first two books’ research data collection took place in Singapore and my latest book’s research data was collected mainly from Australia, all three books tell a global story.
The first book, Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore raises questions on heteronormativity and the institution of marriage as state measures of population control and resource allocation. The second book, Transnational Divorce: Understanding Intimacies and Inequalities from Singapore, exposes the global hierarchy of nations and mass mobilisation of women from less wealthy countries for the supply of (unpaid) intimate labour in the context of marriage. This third book continues the same line of inquiry into global power structures that shape early and contemporary migrant-settler women’s work experiences and participation in the global colonial, racial capitalist, neoliberal economy. In a way, these three books touch on overlapping themes with similar political projects.
No.2
This book examines how Asian migrant women are implicated and complicit in white race-making projects while being subjected to racialisation and marginalisation simultaneously. Can you speak more to this?
If we employ a historicised perspective and examine the colonial history of Asian migrant labour, we will understand that the imported Asian migrant labour has always been set up as supplementary yet integral in the colonial division of labour.
As many scholars like Lisa Lowe have shown, the importation of Asian coolies from China, India and other parts of the region in settler-colonial societies kickstarted the modern form of racial governmentality. The Asian coolie became an add-on to Indigenous and African slave labour, a replacement of the latter when slavery was abolished, and as a filler when white convict labour supply ran low. This racialised structure of labour persists till today where Asian migrant labour continues to be imported and conscripted across the globe for racial capitalist projects.
When we understand the colonial legacy and logic we have come to inherit, we begin to make sense of the position Asian migrant women continue to occupy in the persistent global colonial, racial capitalist labour structures, and the integral, supplementary role they are set up to play in white race-making and white supremacy projects. It is then not hard to see how Asian migrant women continue to encounter racialisation and racism within such colonial labour structure in white settler-colonial societies. Therefore, while it is important to give weight to the discrimination and victimisation Asian migrant women encounter and explain the various interrelated contexts their encounters occur, it is also really urgent to acknowledge their implications, participation and complicity in the expansion of global colonial, racial capitalist, neoliberal economy.
Asian migrant women, knowingly or unknowingly, are implicated in expanding ambitious neoliberal projects and therefore need to reckon with their complicity in dispossessing Indigenous and subjugated peoples, buttressing racial capitalist, colonial and neoliberal logics of resource theft, extraction and hoarding, fuelling global inequalities and contributing to racialisation of less powerful peoples and even self-racialisation.
No.3
Recently, there have been an emergence of theoretical books in the critical race studies field that examine how racialised people can be participants in the above-mentioned white race-making projects, such as Ghassan Hage’s The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023), Olufemi O. Taiwo’s Elite Capture (2022) and Alana Lentin’s The New Racial Regime (2025), to name a few. How do you think Fire Dragon Feminism contributes to this discourse?
Fire Dragon Feminism is an anti-colonial migrant feminist project interested in collecting Asian migrant women’s stories of how they are subjected to often invisible but crucial racialisation for white race-making projects, how they are implicated in and responsible for self-racialisation and upholding white supremacy, how they at the same times are breaking free of racialised myths, queering power structures imposed on them and building solidarities for collective survival and sustainability.
Conducting an autopsy of racialised myths, Fire Dragon Feminism seeks to expose the technology of mythology in colonial, racial capitalist projects that conscript and implicate Asian migrant women, constrict their life trajectories while simultaneously, motivate their anti-colonial resistance and life-sustaining strategies. It is therefore important to ask: how are Asian migrant women’s struggles against coloniality and racial capitalism intimately connected to the global struggles against the colonial occupation of Palestine and genocide of Palestinian people? What we are witnessing in Palestine is the full, unreserved expression of western supremacy, USimperialism, racial capitalism and colonialism. If Fire Dragon Feminism is first and foremost anti-colonialism, anti-racial capitalism, how can it not be concerned with the occupation of Palestine and stand in solidarity with Palestinians and other subjugated populations suffering the full brutality of colonial occupation and violence?
No.4
Likewise, for those who are interested in exploring more through this lens, what scholars or books do you recommend, especially in the Australian context?
Other than Alana Lentin’s The New Racial Regime that I recently completed reading and highly recommend as an urgent read for organising social movements, these are some of my other favourites:
1. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
2. Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman
3. The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe
4. Talkin’ Up to The White Women by Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Even though the first three books on my list speak to the North American context, they are especially instructive in explaining how intimately connected histories of four continents and our present conditions are. I think it is incredibly important to use a historicised perspective to understand how contemporary problems and local material conditions are intimately connected with global histories, transnational geopolitics and international political, economic systems. There are of course many more instructive books exposing coloniality, imperialism, racial capitalism and neoliberalism but for a start, I would recommend reading these books if you have not already.
No.5
In a time where critical race studies are lampooned by openly fascist governments and state actors, with universities defunding relevant departments, do you have any advice for those interested in pursuing these theories?
Find race critical, anti-coloniality, anti-imperialism literacy tools, frameworks, research and writings to learn and study. Seek to understand how the technology of mythology works to reinforce white supremacy, coloniality, imperialism and racial capitalism. Be hypervigilant of popular discourse, seductive ‘progressive’ language, seemingly neutral and ‘inclusive’ policies, and other co-optation measures that blunt our consciousness, silence us into obedience, seduce us into cooperation, and conscript us to keep the racial machinery going. Go beyond identity categories, groupings and politics to build solidarities against broader life-terminating, extractive systems and towards a revolution for sustainable and just futures.
Find Out More
Featuring stories of early settler and contemporary Asian migrant women in Asia-Pacific region, Fire Dragon Feminism discusses Asian migrant women's encounters with coloniality and racial capitalism at their workplace and in their everyday life.
Centring anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist philosophies and strategies, this open access book introduces 'fire dragon feminism' - a migrant feminist strand that aims to blow flames at colonial, racial capitalist and neoliberal structures and build solidarities for more just and sustainable futures.
Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Asian migrant employees in Australian universities, the book examines how Asian migrant women are implicated and complicit in white race-making projects while being subjected to racialisation and marginalisation simultaneously. Fire Dragon Feminism presents a historicised and sociological discussion of the contradictions, trade-offs, complicities and refusals in the Asian migrant women's tales of migration, coloniality and racial capitalism. The author ends the book with a celebration of anti-colonial, anti-racist grassroots feminist activisms.
Get it from Bloomsbury Publishing here.