Alternative Historiography

To obtain a deeper understanding about a society, it is important to look beyond the formal production of history and literature and consider fables, songs, folk poems, and proverbs which can reflect dimensions of the society that are usually neglected or forgotten about. Focusing on popular literature and folk art as a source of epistemological knowledge contributes to the construction of counter-narratives in Yemen. One of the major proponents of popular literature whose works serve as a key to understanding the conceptual worlds of the Yemeni people is the poet ʻAbd Allāh al-Baraddūnī (1929–1999). This blind scholar explored various types of popular literature and folk art in order to highlight the knowledge that generally is not documented but is an essential part of everyday life. Each of his genres has the ability to provide us with insights about Yemeni society such as forgotten historical events, the role of women in society, cultural beliefs, customs, practices, and historical events and circumstances that the society had to face. It is argued that, by focusing on the subaltern and marginal, al-Baraddūnī was anticipating trends in Western social science scholarship that have been apparent since the 1970s.

Contested Landscapes

Colonial and postcolonial imaginaries of the Andaman Islands have represented the islands as a natural prison, a terra nullius, a site of nationalist martyrdom in the Indian anti-colonial struggle, and a repository of indigenous “exotica.” The islands are both a “melting pot” and a “frontier.” Successive waves of migration since 1858 have created a multiethnic and multilingual mosaic referred to as “Southeast India” and “Mini-India.” Convicts incarcerated by the British were joined by partition refugees from eastern Bengal, Adivasis from Chota Nagpur, and Telugu- and Tamil- speaking migrants from southern India. The 500-odd remaining indigenous people of tribal ethnicity are confined to reserved territories, depend on government support, or refuse contact. Strategically located at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, the islands play a crucial role in India’s current military expansion with its aim of countering the Chinese naval presence in the Indo-Pacific. Once the site of British “civilizing” missions, a coercive penal system, violent Japanese occupation during WWII, and a formerly thriving but now outlawed timber industry, the Andamans are the location of conflicting postcolonial imaginaries. From environmentalists’ pleas to “save” the “fragile” islands, to marketing for tourists portraying them as a tropical paradise holiday destination, the Andamans are a poly-semiotic place at the friction point of center-periphery tensions. I focus on three questions in this article: Firstly, how does the Indian mainland/center see the islands? Secondly, how do different islanders see, on the one hand, the mainland—both as it is today and in terms of memorialized places of family origin—and, on the other, “their” own islands and their internal divisions? Thirdly, how do marginalized subaltern islanders conceive of their position on the islands’ periphery—on the one hand vis-.-vis the political centers of Port Blair and Delhi, and, on the other, the politically dominant groups on the islands?

Imaginaries of the Future City in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Vienna

Today, cities the world over are entangled in aspirational future visions, as regions compete with others in different parts of the world for investment, tourists, and talent to guarantee economic growth. This paper approaches the cities of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Vienna via their self-presentations and projections of the future. It sees cities as learning assemblages and pays attention to the narrative construction of imaginaries and future trajectories, as depicted in the respective city galleries and planning museums. All cities are found to be entangled in international policy trends and, in their unique ways, strive for recognition, competitiveness, and conviviality. Singapore emerges as torn between ambition, transparency, and control, while wanting to foster creativity and revive its cultural heritage; Kuala Lumpur appears simultaneously geared by boosterism and at home in opacity and multiplicity, privileging Malays while trying not to alienate other ethnic groups; and Vienna ambivalently projects a future that reconciles nostalgia for monarchic splendor and the social-democratic heritage of egalitarian urbanism with ambitions for international recognition and newly popular trends for citizen participation and “rights to the city.”

Imagining Indonesian Islam as a Center

This article advocates an approach that is conscious of the offline geographies and geopolitics that inform contemporary social media activities. It does so with regard to the Islamic world, examining how Indonesian Muslims imagine their place within it. These imaginaries are increasingly expressed on social media through a variety of discourses in various forms (blogs, memes, videos, etc.). Moreover, in Indonesia today social media have become the main platforms on which different views on the position of Indonesian Islam in the Islamic world collide. More than any other media, they have become a contested space, as they play a crucial role in defining—and rejecting—the very concept of an Indonesian Islam, which today is mainly propagated as Islam Nusantara or the Islam of the Archipelago. The article analyzes the online strategies and social media activities of the proponents of Islam Nusantara, concentrating on the spatial hierarchies that their discourses entail as well as how offline geographies inform their attempts to translate offline significance into online visibility. In a second analytical step, the article considers the literature on Southeast Asian concepts of power with conceptualizations of a center as one of their main features, and argues that today such concepts re-emerge where one would not initially expect them, namely in the online discussions about Islam Nusantara and the position of Indonesian Islam in the Islamic world. The article thus examines imaginaries of transforming centers and peripheries from the particular angle of Islamic identity discourses that are becoming increasingly significant in Indonesia’s public sphere.

Seizing the Center

This article intends to cast light on historical continuities between pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial organized violent crime in Indonesia and its connection to the country’s rulers. The core argument is that Indonesia and the polities which once existed in its territory have a long history of cooperation between the ruling elites and the criminal world. The early-modern era bandits, called jago, and the modern gangsters, known as preman, arguably represented an important pillar of the power of political regimes in Java from the pre-colonial Javanese kingdoms to the Netherlands East Indies’ colonial state to Soeharto’s New Order. In post-Soeharto Indonesia, political liberation combined with the impact of jihadist Islam(ism) has created conditions in which a number of leather-clad gangsters have turned into vigilante defenders of Islam, who are sometimes co-opted by influential interest groups and sometimes sent back to the political periphery after falling out of favor. While the primary objective of this paper is to analyze the issue of oscillation between incorporation, co-optation, and utilization of criminals and radical Islamic groupings by the powerful, on the one hand, and their elimination, on the other, the paper also looks into how Indonesian historiography has depicted these influential bandits/gangsters/vigilantes and how historiographical sources tend to legitimize them to create an authoritative nationalist narrative.

Japan and the Contested Center of Eighteenth-Century East Asia

Eighteenth-century Japan is known for the rise of the publishing industry and the spread of sociability through popular media. Reading against this broader historical context, this paper analyzes texts from different literary genres—namely, a guidebook series called The Illustrated Scenic Beauty of Japan (Fusō meishōzu, 1713–28) and The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusen’ya kassen, 1715), followed by its sequel, The Battles of Coxinga in Later Days (Kokusen’ya gonichi kassen). The paper explores what representative qualities and characteristics were considered Japanese in these texts, especially in contrast to the dominant other at that time, China. For example, drawing from a real historical figure, Zheng Chenggong (1624–1662), otherwise known as Coxinga, the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) produced a tale about the revival of Ming dynastic rule in collaboration with Tokugawa Japan. Given that certain virtues and values held a particular importance in these texts, they can be read analogously with a rise in ambivalence toward the moral and political authority of the shogunate. The changing visions of ideal leadership suggest that the reading public was partaking in the debate about political legitimacy, albeit in the space of popular culture, adding a renewed significance of popular participation to the production of communal identity during the era known as the “Great Peace under heaven” (tenka taihei).

Tibetan “Barbarians” in China’s Borderlands: Changing Perspectives According to the Geographical Records in the Siku Quanshu

China has always considered herself to be the center of the world. Those regions and populations which were not included in the Chinese territory under direct supervision of the imperial court were, depending on their distance from the court, perceived as being in a tighter or looser tributary relation to China. Tibet and its territorial relation to China is one such example and the historical sovereignty or suzerainty of China over Tibet is an omnipresent issue even in the current Sino-Tibetan context. China expresses territorial claims over Tibet originating from the Yuan or even the Tang dynasty, while the Tibetan side argues that Tibet was an independent state until the middle of the twentieth century. There is evidence to support both claims. However, it is difficult to judge historical territorial claims from our contemporary viewpoint and current understanding of the functions and integrity of the state and its borders. Undoubtedly, China and Tibet, as neighboring entities, experienced intense cultural, political, and religious interaction, and depending on the given political situation they would seek alliances or, more frequently, clash as enemies. An inquiry into the geographical records of the Qing dynasty collection of valuable sources, the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu), and particularly into the Qing historiographical record, the Da Qing yitong zhi, and its revised version the Jiaqing chongxiu yitong zhi, indicates that relations between China and Tibet were much more complex than presented by the two political parties nowadays, as they dependednot only on the military strength of the two parties, but also on prevailing economic needs or dominant religious trends.

Silencing the Periphery

Victims of mass violence and crimes against humanity, as well as their descendants, not only have to cope with tremendously cruel deeds but must also face the perpetrators’ denial of culpability and responsibility. In 1937 military operations started against Kurdish Alevi leaders in Turkey. They were followed by planned and coordinated massacres and displacement of the civilian population in Dersim (today Tunceli). Geographically, Dersim was not on the fringes in the southeastern provinces of Turkey, but it was a peripheral region. The mountainous areas were hardly accessible; several military campaigns from the 1850s onwards were unsuccessful in fully integrating the province into the state. The region remained contested until the late 1930s. Under the guise of a modernization policy, the Turkish state carried out a genocidal persecution of civilians who were, in linguistic, religious, and ethnic terms, part of a minority population. As these events have been silenced and denied for a long time, it has become the responsibility of subsequent generations to elaborate on Dersim’s history. The upcoming generation themselves faced (forced) migration and recurrent warfare in the 1990s. Therefore, the transnational community played an important part in coming to terms with the fateful past of Dersim 1937–1738. This article focuses on the contribution of activists in Austria and Germany to this transnational endeavor. In investigating their motivations and the driving forces behind their activism, I scrutinize their individual backgrounds and family histories, and the transgenerational transmission of knowledge. Thus, a biography-centered narrative methodological approach was applied to determine their motivation and activism within the memory work. This allows me to draw conclusions regarding the specific challenges for future generations’ memory work in the transnational Dersim community.

“Like Sugar in Tea”

This article examines how, in a context of conflicting identities and collapsing states throughout the Middle East, the model of an Egyptian nation-state has—conversely—been reinforced during the recent revolutionary and counter-revolutionary waves. At first, the liberation of speech during the “Arab Spring” period of 2011–2013 allowed the public expression of competing models (pan-Islamism, pan-Arabism, Coptic ethno-nationalism, regionalism) of imagined communities. At the same time, however, the national flag became the most widespread symbol of the revolution, appropriated by all the political actors, from the leftists to the Salafis. Since 2013, the expression of diverging conceptions of identity within the political field has become impossible. Thus, the affirmation of alternative models of identity has occasionally taken a violent path, especially in the North-Sinai region, where regionalist feelings meet the pan-Islamism of insurgent jihadi movements. Simultaneously, the state has been trying to co-opt some of the most prominent identities, with a first official recognition of the Nubian culture within the 2014 Constitution, and with the adoption of a quota for Coptic candidates in the Parliament and local councils.

Imaginaries and Historiographies of Contested Regions: Transforming Centers and Peripheries in Asian and Middle Eastern Contexts

The introduction contextualizes respective contributions which were originally presented and discussed at the Anthropological Atelier held in June 2018 in Prague.