What the Heck is Happening on Wikipedia?!!
In 2024, the Wikipedia page for Chenla [Zhenla], contained the following sentence:“According to Paul Pelliot, Sambhupura was the capital of Land Chenla [km] (Upper Chenla) and Vyadhapura was the capital…
Chitu in Cambodia: A “Vigorous Rejection” of Tatsuo Hoshino’s Work
There is a Japanese historian by the name of Tatsuo Hoshino who wrote about premodern mainland Southeast Asia.In 1996, he published an article in the Journal of the Siam Society…
The Tai and Nanzhao
A reader left a comment recently on a blog post that I wrote 14 years ago about what I thought was evidence of some Tai-language speaking people in the area…
Premodern Southeast Asian Imperialism, Decolonizing Historical Knowledge, and the Liberal Bias in Western Historical Scholarship
In researching about “Srivijaya” recently, I have been reading about Southeast Asian history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and I’ve come to realize something that I had not thought…
On Being Southeast Asian and the Bankruptcy of Liberal Persuasion
The other day an article appeared in my Facebook feed called “Being South-East Asian.” It was written by historian, political scientist and public intellectual Farish Noor and published in the…
Imagined Communities and an Imagined Southeast Asian Communitas
There are different types of knowledge that have been (and continue to be) produced about Southeast Asia, from area studies knowledge produced in places like North America, Australia and the…
President Trump’s Opinion of Le Minh Khai
At the recent APEC meeting in Vietnam, President Donald Trump of the USA was apparently asked what he thought of Le Minh Khai by two reporters from The Guardian. I’m…
Popular Music in Twentieth Century Southeast Asia: A New Book!!
One topic that has received very little attention by historians is twentieth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, especially popular culture in the 1950s-1980s. There is a new publication, however, that seeks to at least partially remedy this situation by providing an overview of popular music in Southeast Asia in the twentieth century.
The book is called Popular Music in Southeast Asia: Banal Beats, Muted Histories (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and was written by Bart Barendregt, Peter Keppy and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Further, there is an open access version of the book that is free to download and read.
Chainsmokers “Closer” Covers in Southeast Asia
I read an article last week by Ariel Heryanto called “Popular Culture for a New Southeast Asian Studies?” [in The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies; Korea and Beyond, edited by Park Seung Woo and Victor T. King (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013), 226-262.]
Essentially what Heryanto argues in that article is that popular culture is a topic that scholars have traditionally not focused on, but that if we examine what kind of popular culture is popular in certain areas we can gain an interesting perspective on “what is Southeast Asia.”
Southeast Asian Studies, ASEAN and Western Scholarship
A few days ago I had the pleasure of attending two panels on “Emerging and Continuing Trends in Southeast Asian Studies” at The 10th International Convention of Asian Scholars that was held in Chiang Mai. Those panels made me think a lot about Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia.
Then this morning I was reminded of those two panels when I came across a paper (in Vietnamese) that had just been uploaded to the Internet called “Vietnam at the Crossroad of Area and Global Studies: Vietnamese Knowledge on Southeast Asia and New Approaches.”
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