This chapter explores the conceptual genesis of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s Malay “race.” Introduced at the end of the eighteenth century, Blumenbach’s Malay variety stood out from his other human varieties by being named after a language rather than a place. To understand this taxonomic exceptionality, we trace the forms of argumentation he deployed to gradually include a fifth variety to an initial four-fold division and to name it after the Malay language. This investigation yields insight into Blumenbach’s conceptual, narrative, and methodological dependence on (then) contemporary and earlier studies of human origins and kinship ties through studies of language. Finally, we analyze the epistemic and cultural legacy of his five-fold division of human species and his ranking of the Malay variety as being in transition between the “primordial” European and the “extreme” African variety. In order to identify the historical effects of Blumenbach’s race science on present-day, insular Southeast Asia, we rely on critical studies of “race” informed though affect theory in particular. We deploy Sara Ahmed’s concept of emotionality to understand how racialized qualifiers of transitoriness had been reconfigured as a colonial pedagogic strategy enabling the approximation of the Native American to the Filipino and the Malay.