How are Historical Texts to be Read? My Final Rejoinder to John N. Schumacher, S.J (original) (raw)

Continuing, Re-Emerging, and Emerging Trends in the Field of Southeast Asian History

TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2013

Trends' in the field of Southeast Asian history have a way of being unresolved satisfactorily before 'new' ones emerge to take their place. Part of the reason is that older scholarship is not only considered passé, but each new generation of Southeast Asianists wants to 'make its mark' on the field in original ways. Yet, when one scrutinizes some of these 'new' issues carefully, they often turn out not to be entirely so; rather, they appear to be different ways of approaching and/or expressing older ones, using different (and more current) operating vocabulary. 'Angle of vision' and 'perspective', popular in the 1960s, have become 'privileging of' or 'giving agency to' in current usage, while their methodological intent is exactly the same, bearing the same (or nearly the same) desirable consequences. Older, seminal scholarship is often only given lip-service without much in-depth consideration, so that some of the 'new' scholarship begins 'in the middle of the game', scarcely acknowledging (or knowing) what had transpired earlier. This unawareness regarding the 'lineage' of Southeast Asia scholarship fosters some reinvention and repetition of issues and problems without realizing it, in turn protracting their resolution. So as not to lose sight of this 'scholarly lineage' that not only allows a better assessment of what are genuinely new trends and what are not, but also to resolve unresolved issues and move on to really new things, this essay will analyse and discuss where the field of Southeast Asian history has been, where it is currently, and where it might be headed. Although focused on the discipline of history, it remains ensconced within the context of the larger field of Southeast Asian studies.

M. C. Ricklefs, Bruce Lockhardt, Albert Lau, Portia Reyes, Maitri Aung Thwin, A New History of Southeast Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 84, Part 2, September 2011, No. 301, pp. 122-126

The Making of a Classic in Southeast Asian Studies: Another Look at Kahin, Agoncillo and the Revolutions

South East Asia Research, 2012

“What makes a ‘classic’ in South East Asian Studies?” is the question that this paper seeks to address. It compares and contrasts the features of two books that were written in the late 1940s and early 1950s: George Kahin’s Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia and Teodoro Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses. It examines the subject-position of the authors and the politico-academic contexts in which they were written, assessed and consumed. Specifically, the paper explores the following questions: To what extent did scholarly merit define a ‘classic’? What features internal to particular area studies stimulated or impeded the making of a potential classic? What sort of political and academic architectures were conducive or unreceptive to potential candidates? And in what ways, and to what extent, have the ‘rules of the game’ changed sixty years later?

Southeast Asian Studies after Said

Arts the Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association, 2012

This is the first part of a broader attempt to describe the state of Southeast Asian Studies, and to suggest a number of alternative paths that we might follow in order to maintain the integrity of the field. Here I suggest that we Southeast Asianists have tended to throw the textual baby out with the Orientalist bathwater, and that a study of Southeast Asia should be based on theories of representation. Like 'Asia', 'Southeast Asia' is an entirely artificial term. While 'Asia' has been around for a very long time indeed, the subset of Asia that stretches between the eastern-most border of India and Papua-New Guinea has only been designed as 'Southeast Asia'-or 'South East Asia'-since the 1940s. Southeast Asia came into being as a military convenience when Mountbatten and MacArthur were dividing their commands in the campaign against the Japanese. Southeast Asia is incredibly diverse-it covers complex ethnicity and hundreds of languages, found within at least four major language groups: Burmo-Tibetan; Mon-Khmer; Tai; and Austronesian. If we accept that there is such a thing as 'Southeast Asian Studies', then the question is how to study this diversity. Or, more particularly, how are we to represent Southeast Asia in scholarly terms? While Southeast Asian Studies has always had its own methodological histories, these have not always been articulated. I argue that it is by adhering to the examples set by scholarship of the region that we can best come to terms with it, and that means specifically returning to a study of forms of representation, the kind of study rejected in the wake of Edward

Fragments, Links, and Palimpsests: A Review of Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998

Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, 2021

Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945– 1998), edited by Gaik Cheng Khoo, Thomas Barker, and Mary J. Ainslie (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), presents a collection of studies on film cultures that explore cinema’s function as a vessel of accounts across several Southeast Asian countries. The anthology is divided into three main sections where the accompanying chapters map out topics such as developments on nationalism, advances leading to Golden Ages, contributions by key figures, and selected popular works. The thirteen chapters are composed of scholarly essays that focus on a specific period, film artists, and cultural texts that additionally shape the connections within the Southeast Asian region.