Nationalist Movements in Southeast Asia: General

1994 ◽  
pp. 135-138
Author(s):  
D. R. SarDesai
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Nationalist Movements

Revolutionary Cosmopolitanism and its Limits

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Guo-Quan Seng (成国泉)
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Nationalist Movements ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract This article analyzes the extent and limits of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) revolutionary cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia. Between 1945 and 1949, the CCP intellectuals Hu Yuzhi and Wang Renshu operated a network of leftwing newspapers in Southeast Asia’s major urban centers. They championed the revolution in the homeland, while supporting anti-colonial nationalist movements in the region. Taking a comparative approach, I argue that the CCP’s revolutionary cosmopolitanism developed and diverged on the ground according to the diasporic community’s social structure, the contingency of events in the process of decolonization and initiatives taken by local CCP leaders. While the CCP in Jakarta turned neutral in the face of republican atrocities against Chinese, Singapore and Medan went on to mobilize merchants and youths to take part in local anti-colonial movements. The CCP stood for a moderate, anti-colonial Malayan nationalism in Singapore, in comparison with a more radical, non-assimilationist position in solidarity with Indonesia’s independence struggle in Medan.

scholarly journals Unfinished Revolutions

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 479-500
Author(s):  
Li Wen Jessica Tan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Social Mobilization ◽  
Nationalist Movements ◽  
Dialectical Tension ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract This article examines Wei Beihua's modernist works, which have receded into the shadows of Sinophone Malayan (Mahua) literary history, in relation to Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar, to excavate a neglected route of transculturation at the height of Southeast Asia's nationalist movements during the 1950s. Unlike Anwar's modernist poems that thrive in Indonesia, Wei Beihua's works were considered outliers during a period when realist literature was deemed an effective tool for social mobilization in postwar Malaya. Nonetheless, it is critical for us to recognize that Wei Beihua did not reject realism or underestimate the role of literature in nation building. This article argues that Wei Beihua's idea of modernism is premised on an artist's affective and self-reflexive engagement with realism, which gives rise to a dialectical tension. The tension between his advocacy of an artist's individualism, which is inspired by Anwar, and the impetus of responding to nationalism manifests in his meta-fictional short stories that reflect on the varying motivations behind art creation. His works offer a productive perspective to reconsider the modernist artist's role during revolution and “the limits of realism” of revolutionary works when art was deemed integral to nation building in postwar Southeast Asia.

On The Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. W. Small
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

It is generally accepted that history is an element of culture and the historian a member of society, thus, in Croce's aphorism, that the only true history is contemporary history. It follows from this that when there occur great changes in the contemporary scene, there must also be great changes in historiography, that the vision not merely of the present but also of the past must change.

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