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

Southeast Asia in World History

2009

Introduction This brief essay will introduce a number of points at which the largely ignored region of Southeast Asia can be usefully integrated into a standard world history curriculum. Every semester I teach at least one section of modern world history; a required course for my university’s 18,000 undergraduate students. As anyone who has taught such a one semester course will understand, there simply isn’t time to delve deeply into the history of any country or region. Instead, we attempt to develop unifying themes that enable undergraduates to connect otherwise dispersed narratives and weave them into a coherent whole. This is a difficult job for both teachers and students. So, how can Southeast Asia be integrated into instruction to assist students and teachers create that coherent whole?

Southeast Asia in Global History: 1500 to Present (L22 HIS 100 Syllabus, WUSTL, 2017)

This introductory survey course traces the formation of Southeast Asia from the sixteenth century to the present. Students will closely examine how political, social and religious ideologies developed in different parts of Southeast Asia, including the nation-states of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand. The course traces the conceptualization of Southeast Asia as a region, examines political configurations, trade connections, religious division, and kinship structures in both continental and insular Southeast Asia, and discusses the Indian, Islamic, and Chinese influence in the region. It will further explore the wide-ranging impact of European colonialism and competition since the seventeenth century, Japanese expansion and American involvement during and after WWII. The course concludes with an examination of nascent nation-states in the postwar period. Students will explore this history through engagement with primary and secondary sources. March 29, 2017: Registration opens for the course.

Southeast Asian Studies in Asia: Recent Trends

Ajia Kenkyu, 2021

The fourth Kashiyama Seminar was held as an international symposium at the annual conference of Japan Association for Asian Studies (June 2019, Keio University) on the theme of 'Southeast Asian Studies in Asia: New Perspectives on Inter-Asia Relations'. Current work on Southeast Asian Studies in Asia covers a diverse range of issues. Political science work tends to focus on traditional topics such as democratization or domestic political integration, while research concerns in the field of economics generally involves cross-regional and globally comparative topics such as sub-regional development. Work on Islamic Studies and Ethnic Studies of Chinese in Southeast Asia have been rapidly emerging in the humanities and social sciences. Ethnic Chinese studies can be seen to coincide with Southeast Asia’s social change toward overcoming conventional social taboos. Contemporary Southeast Asian studies in Asia are diverse; those in China seems driven by Belt and Load Initiative’s momentum, while those of Taiwan seems largely related to their concern on national security issues or reconsider- ation of national identification. The purpose of the symposium was to view these diversified research trends in the academic community, and to discuss future directions for work in the field.

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