A guide to resources and research on Southeast Asia
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Featured New Materials about SE Asia
Indigenous Media and Popular Culture in the Philippines by Jason Paolo Telles (Editor)This book argues that the production of media content, literature, and other forms of popular culture by Indigenous peoples (IPs), as well as their involvement as advisors, sources, or interviewees, serves as a platform for them not only to showcase their creativity but also to mediate their cultures, identities, worldviews, and activism. Through an examination of specific case studies of indigenous media and popular culture in the Philippines using textual and ethnographic methods, the chapters in this book shed light on the politics of representation, narratives of resistance, and self-representation and mediation of indigeneity and culture. They emphasize the crucial importance of addressing these issues to promote the recognition and empowerment of IPs, not only within the Philippines but also across Southeast Asia and the global context.
ISBN: 9789819991006
Publication Date: 2024-02-09
Diplomats at War by Charles TrueheartFor two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combine to spark the drama of a lifetime Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick "Fritz" Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William "Bill" Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam's landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history. Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart--Bill's son and Nolting's godson--who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States' headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point--that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States' disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
ISBN: 9780813951287
Publication Date: 2024-02-13
Shaping a Dutch East Indies by Siegfried HuigenIn 1724-1726, the Dutch clergyman François Valentyn published a 5,000-page account of the Dutch East India Company's empire. It was the first and, for a long time, the only survey of the Dutch establishments in Asia and South Africa. Shaping a Dutch East Indies analyses how Valentyn composed this work and how it largely determined the Dutch perspective on the colonies in Asia until the 1850s. It seeks to highlight both the great diversity of knowledge gathered in Valentyn's book and its geographical spread, from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, with a focus on the Indonesian archipelago. Huigen's book is the first in-depth study of Valentyn's work, which is a foundational text in the history of Dutch colonialism.
ISBN: 9789004524989
Publication Date: 2023-04-13
Malayan Classicism by Soon-Tzu SpeechleyThrough a broad range of case studies spanning from imperial monuments to rural residences, Malayan Classicism puts forward a fundamentally new understanding of classical architecture in the Asian colonial context. Across Malaysia and Singapore, thousands of historic buildings are richly ornamented with motifs drawn from Ancient Greece and Rome - as plump volutes, lush acanthus leaves, and neat rows of dentils decorate mosques, palaces, government buildings and innumerable terraced shophouses. These classical details jostle with ideas drawn from other architectural traditions from across Asia in a style that is unique to the region. Presenting the first comprehensive account of what was, prior to World War II, Malaya's most widespread architectural style, Malayan Classicism explores how the classical architecture of the British Empire was transmitted, translated, and transformed in the hands of local builders and architects. Addressing a critical gap in the scholarship, this book charts the metamorphosis of an imperial language of power into a local vernacular style, and provides a new way of reading classical architecture in a post-colonial context that will be applicable throughout the Global South.
ISBN: 9781350360341
Publication Date: 2023-12-28
Contested Civil Society in Myanmar by Maaike MatelskiePDFs of chapters 4, 5 and 7 are available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licenceThis book centres on various contestations in Myanmar society and illustrates the ways in which these are reflected in civil society. The book offers a concise overview of recent political developments in the country, from the short-lived attempts at democratization to the 2021 military coup, and analyses the involvement of various civil society actors, as well as their international supporters. It incorporates multiple identities and fault lines in Myanmar society and explains how these influence diverse perceptions, framing and agenda setting as political developments unfold. The book provides an up-to-date overview of the main identities and contestations within Myanmar's civil society and, by extension, within Myanmar society as a whole. It also gives recommendations to donors, policy makers and researchers wishing to better understand and support local civil society actors operating in repressive environments.
ISBN: 9781529230543
Publication Date: 2023-12-19
Bundok by Adrian De LeonFrom the late eighteenth century, the hinterlands of Northern Luzon and its Indigenous people were in the crosshairs of imperial and capitalist extraction. Combining the breadth of global history with the intimacy of biography, Adrian De Leon follows the people of Northern Luzon across space and time, advancing a new vision of the United States's Pacific empire that begins with the natives and migrants who were at the heart of colonialism and its everyday undoing. From the emergence of Luzon's eighteenth-century tobacco industry and the Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association's documentation of workers to the movement of people and ideas across the Suez Canal and the stories of Filipino farmworkers in the American West, De Leon traces "the Filipino" as a racial category emerging from the labor, subjugation, archiving, and resistance of native people. De Leon's imaginatively constructed archive yields a sweeping history that promises to reshape our understanding of race making in the Pacific world.
ISBN: 9781469676487
Publication Date: 2023-12-05
Boys Love Media in Thailand by Thomas Baudinette; Jian Xu (Series edited by); Sean Redmond (Series edited by)Over the past several years, the Thai popular culture landscape has radically transformed due to the emergence of "Boys Love" (BL) soap operas which celebrate the love between handsome young men. Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture is the first book length study of this increasingly significant transnational pop culture phenomenon. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic research, the book reveals BL's impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai media culture and the resultant mainstreaming of queer romance through new forms of celebrity and participatory fandom. The author explores how the rise of BL has transformed contemporary Thai consumer culture, leading to heterosexual female fans of male celebrities who perform homoeroticism becoming the main audience to whom Thai pop culture is geared. Through the case study of BL, this book thus also investigates how Thai media is responding to broader regional trends across Asia where the economic potentials of female and queer fans are becoming increasingly important. Baudinette ultimately argues that the center of queer cultural production in Asia has shifted from Japan to Thailand, investigating both the growing international fandom of Thailand's BL series as well as the influence of international investment into the development of these media. The book particularly focuses on specific case studies of the fandom for Thai BL celebrity couples in Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Japan to explore how BL series have transformed each of these national contexts' queer consumer cultures.
ISBN: 9781350330641
Publication Date: 2023-11-02
Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar by Jenny Hedström (Editor); Elisabeth Olivius (Editor)Jenny Hedström (Editor) Jenny Hedström is an associate professor in war studies at the Swedish Defence University. Her research concerns the relationship between gender and war, with a focus on rebel warfare in Myanmar.Elisabeth Olivius (Editor) Elisabeth Olivius is an associate professor in political science at Umeå University whose research explores how gendered relations of power are produced and reshaped in conflict, displacement and peacebuilding.
ISBN: 9788776943226
Publication Date: 2022-11-30
Timor-Leste's Long Road to Independence by Zelia Pereira (Editor); Rui Graça Feijó (Editor)From a much neglected Portuguese colony to independence, Timor-Leste travelled a belated, long and troubled journey that included a 24-year Indonesian occupation. A classic process of European decolonization (1974-1975) was followed by a nationalist struggle against "Third World Colonialism" (1975-1999), and a final phase under the direct aegis of the United Nations (1999-2002). More than a direct relation between coloniser and colonised, this turbulent process involved the participation of many different actors scattered around the world. The "Timor Issue" brought to the scene a martyred people's determination, the diplomacy of several nations (friends or foes), the involvement of the United Nations, and the activism of solidarity networks. This collection adopts a transnational approach that highlights the complexity of Timor-Leste's road to independence.
ISBN: 9789463726375
Publication Date: 2023-07-19
Sensing Others by Alice RudgeSensing Others explores the lives of Indigenous Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds. Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, Alice Rudge argues that as people seek to make habitable a constantly changing landscape, what counts as Otherness is always under negotiation. Anthropology's traditional dictum to "make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange" creates a binary between the familiar and the Other, often encapsulating Indigenous lives as the archetypal Other to the "modern" worldview. Yet living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness's ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. Sensing Others reveals that when looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.
ISBN: 9781496235466
Publication Date: 2023-10-01
Rights Refused by Elliott Prasse-FreemanFor decades, the outside world mostly knew Myanmar as the site of a valiant human rights struggle against an oppressive military regime, predominantly through the figure of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And yet, a closer look at Burmese grassroots sentiments reveals a significant schism between elite human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects maneuvering under brutal and negligent governance. While elites have endorsed human rights logics, subalterns are ambivalent, often going so far as to refuse rights themselves, seeing in them no more than empty promises. Such alternative perspectives became apparent during Burma's much-lauded decade-long "transition" from military rule that began in 2011, a period of massive change that saw an explosion of political and social activism. How then do people conduct politics when they lack the legally and symbolically stabilizing force of "rights" to guarantee their incursions against injustice? In this book, Elliott Prasse-Freeman documents grassroots political activists who advocate for workers and peasants across Burma, covering not only the so-called "democratic transition" from 2011-2021, but also the February 2021 military coup that ended that experiment and the ongoing mass uprising against it. Taking the reader from protest camps, to flop houses, to prisons, and presenting practices as varied as courtroom immolation, occult cursing ceremonies, and land reoccupations, Rights Refused shows how Burmese subaltern politics compel us to reconsider how rights frameworks operate everywhere.
ISBN: 9781503636712
Publication Date: 2023-09-05
The Politics of Federalization in Myanmar by Dulyapak PreecharushThis book examines the trajectory of federalization in Myanmar's political development, evaluating the attitudes of different political actors toward, and negotiation strategies for, designing federalism. It argues that three factors drive federalization in Myanmar, namely constitutionalization, conflict management, and democratization. The confluence of these forces arrived at a critical juncture in 2011, the start of Myanmar's political transition, leading to significant changes in Myanmar's federation process. By analyzing the changes and continuities in federalism building, the book charts the dynamic pathway toward Myanmar's current federalization, revealing how periods of progress and stagnation reflect varying world views and the individual strategies of prominent political actors. Offering a systematic conceptual framework on federalism in Myanmar, this will be a useful resource for students and scholars of Political Science, Comparative Politics, and Southeast Asian Politics.
ISBN: 9781032373799
Publication Date: 2023-02-24
The Philippines by Mark R. ThompsonThis Element explores how in the Philippines a 'whiggish' narrative of democracy and good governance triumphing over dictatorship and kleptocracy after the 'people power' uprising against Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986 was upended by strongman Rodrigo R. Duterte three decades later. Portraying his father's authoritarian rule as a 'golden age,' Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. succeeded Duterte by easily winning the 2022 presidential election, suggesting democratic backsliding will persist. A structuralist account of the inherent instability of the country's oligarchical democracy offers a plausible explanation of repeated crises but underplays agency. Strategic groups have pushed back against executive aggrandizement. Offering a 'structuration' perspective, presidential power and elite pushback are examined as is the reliance on political violence and the instrumentalization of mass poverty. These factors have recurrently combined to lead to the fall, restoration, and now steep decline of democracy in the Philippines.
ISBN: 9781009398480
Publication Date: 2023-05-25
Islam and Political Power in Indonesia and Malaysia by Joseph Chinyong LiowIslamism in Indonesia and Malaysia has undergone a fascinating transformation from social movement roots to mainstream politics. How did this take place, and to what ends? Drawing on social movement theories, this Element explains this transformation by focusing on key Islamic social movements in these two countries. It argues: first, that the popularity and appeal of Islamism in Indonesia and Malaysia cannot be understood without appreciating how these social movements have enabled and facilitated mobilization; and second, that it is precisely these roots in civil societal mobilization that account for the enduring influence of Islamist politics evident in how Islamic social movements have shaped and transformed the political landscape. These arguments will be developed by unpacking how Islamist ideas took root in social movement settings, the kinds of institutional and organizational structures through which these ideas were advanced, and the changing political landscape that facilitated these processes.
ISBN: 9781108705585
Publication Date: 2022-08-25
I Feel No Peace by Kaamil AhmedLonglisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing Rohingya men, women and children have been fleeing their homes for forty years. The tipping point came in August 2017, when almost 700,000 were wrung from Myanmar in a single military operation. Today, very few members of this Muslim minority remain in the country. Instead, they live mostly in Bangladesh's refugee camps; or precariously in Malaysia, India, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. With the Rohingya almost entirely in exile, I Feel No Peaceis the first book-length exploration of their lives abroad, drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews and long-standing relationships within the diaspora. Kaamil Ahmed speaks to the families of snatched children, and people kidnapped to feed the human trafficking nourished by Rohingya suffering. Most disturbingly, he reveals the complicity of NGOs and the UN in the refugees' plight. But Ahmed also uncovers resilience and hope; stories of how a scattered community survives. The lives uncovered in I Feel No Peaceare complex, heart-breaking and unforgettable.
ISBN: 9781787389311
Publication Date: 2023-05-01
The Barter Economy of the Khmer Rouge Labor Camps by Scott PribblePribble investigates the barter economies that developed in many of the labor camps established under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge abolished currency and markets in 1975, starving Cambodians created underground exchanges in labor camps throughout the country, bartering luxury items for food and other necessities, while simultaneously undermining the regime's ideological goals of eliminating any traces of capitalism in Democratic Kampuchea. Pribble asserts three key points about the barter economy in the Khmer Rouge labor camps. First, the underground exchanges in Democratic Kampuchea provided food and medicine for desperate people subsisting under a totalitarian regime, saving the lives of countless Cambodians. Second, bartering was the riskiest way to obtain food because it was dependent upon the discretion of two or more individuals from different social classes under the threat of violent punishment, thereby altering the social dynamics of the camps. Finally, despite the regime's extreme efforts to eliminate foreign influence from the country and impose communist ideology on millions of citizens, basic forms of market capitalism and a demand for superfluous luxury goods persisted in labor camps throughout the country. A fascinating study of the human consequences of imposing rigid ideology, that will be of particular interest to scholars and students of political history and Southeast Asian history.
ISBN: 9781032387024
Publication Date: 2023-06-01
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