Lương Trúc Đàm, Education, and the Knowledge of the West and the Center
The words that we use have a tremendous influence on how we see and understand the world, and this is particularly the case with the names of nations. As soon…
The Death and Afterlife of the Public Phone in Southeast Asia
I was in the Rangoon airport a while ago when I came across this scene here. It is a space for some kind of public phone, but there is no…
On (Not) Dealing with the Past in Southeast Asia
In 1965 there was a coup in Indonesia. Sukarno was overthrown, and the coup was blamed on Communists. A purge of suspected Communists then ensued, and some half a million…
Southeast Asians Studying Abroad
The Australian National Archives has a lot of pictures from the 1950s-1970s of students from Southeast Asia. This was a time when the Australian government provided a lot of scholarships…
Mixing Politics, Ethnicity and Culture in Southeast Asia
This past week I read a book that came out a few years ago, Jamie S. Davidson’s From Rebellion to Riots: Collective Violence on Indonesian Borneo (Madison: University of Wisconsin…
Southeast Asian Hand Art
I wrote a short post a while ago called “The Art in Southeast Asian Archives” where I made the point that when you do research you often come across things…
The Divided Fight Against Colonial Rule in Southeast Asia
One of the main myths that nationalist historiography creates is that the people of the nation all unite together for a common cause. During the period of decolonization, the common…
Serving the Japanese in Southeast Asia during WW II
The National Archives of Australia has quite a few materials on the activities of Japanese in Southeast Asia during World War II as the Australians were involved in the effort…
Ethnicity South of the Yangzi
In his 1983 work, The Birth of Vietnam, Keith Taylor stated that by the time of the establishment of an autonomous polity in the Red River delta in the tenth…
The American Neo-Colonial Educational Apparatus in South Vietnam
I was cleaning up some things today when I came across a photocopy of an issue of the journal Vietnamese Studies. I don’t see a date on it but the…