How can a controversy about forms of deference (show of respect to the elite) in Java reveal tensions around colonial policies and the rise of nationalism? What was VietNamese about the French colonial governor's palace in Hanoi, and how did the VietNamese design partially French rural houses? What can the circulation of jazz in Asia tell us about ......
The golden age of Malay film in the 1950s and 1960s was the product of a musical and cultural cosmopolitanism in the service of a nation-making process based on ideas of Malay ethnonationalism, initially fluid, increasingly homogenised over time. The commercial films of the period, and in particular their film music, from national cultural icons ......
An important case study in the history of law under colonialism, Colonial Law Making explores the structural forces and contingent exchanges that shaped colonial law in Cambodia, draws comparisons across the region and examines Cambodia's post-independence colonial legacy. The court of King Norodom and the temples of Angkor Wat became orientalist ......
Global Christianity and the Local Church in Penang and Singapore, 1819-2000
In postcolonial Singapore and Malaysia, Pentecostal megachurches dominate the Christian landscape, but the "big four" Protestant churches-Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Brethren-remain religions of heritage for many. Sixty Malaysian and nineteen Singaporean assemblies identify themselves as Christian Brethren, and most trace their roots to ......
The countries that make up Southeast Asia are seeing an incredible resurgence in their economic power. Over the past fifty years, their combined wealth has reached the same level as the United Kingdom and, taken together, they are on track to become the fifth-largest world economy. But that stability and success has drawn the attention of the ......
This book provides an account of the vigorous survival of an Islamic community in the strife-torn borderlands of the lower Mekong Delta and its creative accommodation to the modernising reforms of the Vietnamese government. Officially regarded as one of Vietnam's national minority groups, the multilingual Cham are part of a cosmopolitan, ......
Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia
How should colonial film archives be read? How can historians and ethnographers use colonial film as a complement to conventional written sources? Sandeep Ray uses the case of Dutch colonial film in Indonesia to show how a critically-, historically- and cinematically-informed reading of colonial film in the archive can be a powerful and unexpected ......
The Khorat Plateau is a landscape of some 155,000 square kilometres of what is now northeast Thailand and central Laos. Despite the rich evidence for the region's dynamism and development in the metal age, knowledge of subsequent first millennium developments on the Khorat Plateau remains limited. The spread of Buddhism across the region has been ......
Histories, Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago
In 1999, the people of Indonesia's Riau Archipelago were angry. Resentful of decades of 'internal colonialism' by Mainland Sumatra, and concerned that they lacked the education and skills to flourish in a globalised world, they dreamed of inhabiting a province of their own. When the post-authoritarian state committed itself to democracy and local ......
