scholarly journals Southeast Asian Trajectories: Eurocentrism and the History of the Modern Nation-State; Southeast Asia: Past and Present, by D. R. SarDesai

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Mark T. Berger
2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 999-1032 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Proschan

Since its appearance in 1983, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has taken on almost talismanic status, ritually invoked for its quasi-magical efficacy in thousands of scholarly discussions of nationalism and ethnicity. Anderson's book has given focus to a line of argument in which not only nationalism but also ethnicity are seen as reflexes of the Euroamerican colonial enterprise. Anderson proposes what we might call an “appendency theory” of ethnicity, holding that ethnicity is a phenomenon that is secondary to, contingent upon, and necessarily later than the modern nation, and that therefore it could not possibly have existed prior to the colonial conquest and the creation of nation-states. In this view, ethnicity itself is a recent product of modern history—of the colonial or postcolonial era, the age of the modern nation state and the capitalist world system.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Michaud

AbstractThis editorial develops two themes. First, it discusses how historical and anthropological approaches can relate to each other, in the field of the highland margins of Asia and beyond. Second, it explores how we might further our understandings of the uplands of Asia by applying different terms such as ‘Haute-Asie’, the ‘Southeast Asian Massif’, the ‘Hindu Kush–Himalayan region’, the ‘Himalayan Massif’, and in particular ‘Zomia’, a neologism gaining popularity with the publication of James C. Scott’s latest book, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia.1 Through a discussion of the notion of Zomia, I will reconsider certain ‘truths’ regarding highland Asian studies. In the process, I seek to contribute to disembedding minority studies from the national straitjackets that have been imposed by academic research bounded by the historical, ideological, and political limits of the nation-state.


2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1423-1463 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EILENBERG

AbstractPost-independence ethnic minorities inhabiting the Southeast Asian borderlands were willingly or unwillingly pulled into the macro politics of territoriality and state formation. The rugged and hilly borderlands delimiting the new nation-states became battlefronts of state-making and spaces of confrontation between divergent political ideologies. In the majority of the Southeast Asian borderlands, this implied violent disruption in the lives of local borderlanders that came to affect their relationship to their nation-state. A case in point is the ethnic Iban population living along the international border between the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan and the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Based on local narratives, the aim of this paper is to unravel the little known history of how the Iban segment of the border population in West Kalimantan became entangled in the highly militarized international disputes with neighbouring Malaysia in the early 1960s, and in subsequent military co-operative ‘anti-communist’ ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts by the two states in the late 1960–1970s. This paper brings together facets of national belonging and citizenship within a borderland context with the aim of understanding the historical incentives behind the often ambivalent, shifting and unruly relationship between marginal citizens like the Iban borderlanders and their nation-state.


Author(s):  
Philip V. Bohlman

Looking at the contentious history of the Eurovision Song Contest, ‘Music of the nations’ considers the complex relationship between world music, nationalism, and the modern nation-state. In her winning song in 2016, ‘1944’, the Ukrainian entry Jamala switched from English to Crimean Tatar, a political reference to the Russian annexation of Ukraine. Zimbabwe changed its anthem from ‘God Save the Queen’ to an African song via ‘Ode to Joy.’ ‘HaTikva’ went from a chorus at an international congress to the Israeli national anthem. There are also supra- or international anthems like the ‘Internationale’, a standard of the socialist movement worldwide.


1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denys Lombard

It is truly not easy to write a “well integrated” history of Southeast Asia. If today, anybody feels such a necessity, the procedure is far from obvious, and thus the utility of using a special issue such as the present one to take stock of the situation is quite evident. The main difficulty is in fact to transcend the heaviness of regional, colonial and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Denham ◽  
Mark Donohue

The Holocene history of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) is dominated by the ‘Out-of-Taiwan’ hypothesis and derivatives, such as the spread of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic. According to these ideas, approximately 4500–4000 years ago, farmer-voyagers from Taiwan migrated southward into ISEA to subsequently acculturate, assimilate or displace pre-existing inhabitants. These processes are considered to have produced a consilience between human genetics, Austronesian languages and the archaeological record within ISEA, although recurrent critiques have questioned these putative correspondences. These critiques have proposed that each line of evidence should be independently evaluated and considered, rather than assumed to correspond. In this paper, the authors advocate a fuller engagement with and a deeper understanding of the spatial and temporal processes that structure archaeological, genetic and linguistic distributions within Island Southeast Asia. Geography and history are often marginalized in discussions of the Holocene history of ISEA, yet both are fundamental to the interpretation and reconciliation of multidisciplinary data within the region. These themes are discussed using aphorisms that are designed to be illustrative, namely to promote thought and reflection, rather than to be comprehensive.


1981 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Gungwu

The number of scholarly books and articles on the Chinese in Southeast Asia has increased so rapidly during this century that it would be useful to examine some of the trends in writing and put the results into some historical perspective. For example, there have been the early writings by Chinese in China and by various colonial officials of the region; then came writings by Southeast Asian Chinese themselves, whether in Chinese or in some local or colonial language; and more recently, the work of specialist scholars trained in social science disciplines, including the work of local scholars whether of Chinese descent or not. There is scope for a full-scale study of the whole range of historical works and it is hoped that the study will be attempted soon. This essay is a preliminary outline and focuses on writings in Chinese, especially those which help to mark some important turning-points both in the history of the Chinese communities and in the writing of history itself.


2000 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Christopher E. Goscha

This paper adopts a regional and geographical approach to show how the early spread of communism to mainland South-east Asia owes much to overseas Chinese and overland Vietnamese patterns of immigration. This wider approach seeks to get beyond the frontiers of nationalist histories and the formation of the 'modern' nation-state (whether colonial or national) in order to think in more material terms about how communism and not entirely unlike Catholicism or any other religion first entered mainland Southeast Asia on the ground, by which channels, by which groups of people and at which times. The idea is to begin mapping out the introduction and spread of communism in peninsular Southeast Asia in both time and space. This, in turn, provides us with a methodologically and historically sounder basis for thinking about the 'why' of this Sino-Vietnamese revolutionary graft and the failure of this brand of conmmunism to take hold in certain places and among certain peoples outside of China and Vietnam.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Imam Subchi

Hadrami-Arabs have played essential roles in Islamisation process across Southeast Asian region. This article diachronically examines the history of Hadrami community and their roles in islamisation. It looks at the dynamics, adaptation, and contestation of Islamisation in the region. This article offers actors-centered accounts of how the Hadrami community contributes to Islamic proselitisation activism (dakwah), politics, and contestation within the community. It further argues that, throughout the history of Hadrami in Southeast Asia, political adaptation and contestation have been essential elements that shape the current Islamic-scape in contemporary Southeast Asia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (03) ◽  
pp. 601-620
Author(s):  
Hieyoon Kim

Since its publication, Yi Yŏngil's Complete history of Korean cinema (1969) has remained a seminal work of film historiography. A critical rereading of the work is required, however, to capture the paradoxes of postcolonial historiography that are created by the spatial-temporal orders of modernity in a decolonizing, non-Western society. By examining Yi's creative use of historical documentation, such as oral testimonies of filmmakers, this article considers how he offers a counter-narrative against colonialist historiography that denies Korea's agency to transform itself into a modern nation-state without Japanese annexation. However, despite his decolonizing endeavor, his work cannot fully eradicate the colonial effects that inevitably shape postcolonial subjectivity in the globalizing world. In reassessing the possibilities and predicaments of his work, this article reveals Yi's fundamental conundrum as a postcolonial writer living with the effects of colonialism, ultimately challenging the imagination of the postcolonial experience as an uninterrupted struggle to establish an autonomous nation.


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