Modern Indonesians and Medieval Việt
I recently started reading the famous Indonesian novel Never the Twain (Saluh Asuhan) by Abdoel Moeis. Written in 1928, it is about a young Minangkabau man, Hanafi, who has become…
A Chinese Hawaiian Beauty Queen and Singaporean Satay in 1962
The Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii has been hosting a beauty pageant since 1950 as part of a larger event known as the Narcissus Festival. The pageant is for…
Music and the (Un)Importance of a Southeast Asian Cultural Substratum
In 1993, the same year that O. W. Wolters gave the speech in Jakarta about Southeast Asia that I mentioned in the previous post, Vietnamese scholar Đinh Gia Khánh published a…
Flying Heads, Third Gender Spirit Mediums and Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study
Someone asked me today to suggest some books about the general history of Southeast Asia, and this reminded me of a larger “problem” that I’ve been thinking about for a…
Maps of Islands in the West Philippine Sea from the 1770s
The Philippines is one of several Southeast Asian nations that is challenging China’s claim to various islands in what Chinese call the South China Sea, but what people in the…
Electrifying the Male Body in Early-20th-Century Singapore
A few months ago I wrote about an advertisement that I found in a Chinese-language newspaper from Singapore in the early twentieth century for a “manhood creator.” Today I came…
A French Barbie in the Bà Nà Hills
I’m not a big fan of museums. I think some are ok, but in general I just don’t enjoy looking at objects in glass cases. So whenever I find myself…
An Alternative Narrative of the Transition to Westernized Modernity in Early-Twentieth-Century Vietnam
When I first started to learn about Vietnamese history, I was taught a certain “narrative” about the Vietnamese past. That narrative argued that in the early twentieth century Phan Bội…
Sinn Sisamouth and the Emotional Imagining of National Space
Anh Tây Bụi just left a comment which mentioned the vast number of Vietnamese songs that have been written about ethnic minority peoples who live in the mountains. This reminded…
Teaching the Nation in 1969 North Vietnam
There is a 1969 North Vietnamese movie that I liked called The Highland Female Teacher (Cô giáo vùng cao). It’s about a 19 year-old Hmong woman who is sent up…
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