Abstract This study examines how three Nanyang pioneer artists, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi, and Cheong Soo Pieng, negotiated cultural identity through the practice of their modern ink painting. This paper argues that the artistic practice of these three artists could be read as embodying a sustained dialogue between inherited Chinese ink traditions and the modernist expressions of Southeast Asia. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s interpretation of diaspora and identity, together with Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and the “Third Space,” the paper integrates a formal visual analysis with historical interpretation in examining selected works by these artists. This paper argues that these artists have redefined modern ink painting as a medium of cultural translation and transformation of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.
A global shift towards decentralisation includes the spread of territorial autonomy for separatist minorities and Indigenous sovereignty movements. These trends and accompanying scholarship have evolved in isolation, to their mutual detriment. This paper has two goals. First, it identifies Indigenous autonomy as one form of territorial autonomy and one manifestation of Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous autonomy resembles mainstream autonomy, but has distinct origins, powers, leadership, and scale. Second, while existing research focuses on Latin America and the Arctic, this paper looks to Asia. I identify four sets of cases: Existing autonomous regions not always seen as Indigenous, Indigenous subregions nested within autonomous regions, special subnational units rarely seen as autonomous or Indigenous, and recognised Indigenous peoples lacking territorial government. A clearer sense of Indigenous autonomy has the potential to deliver renewed, albeit partial sovereignty to Asia's tribal peoples.
During the first, long tenure of Dr Mahathir Mohamad as Prime Minster of Malaysia (1981-2003), the country embarked on a long-term strategy to achieve the status of a highly developed nation. This "Vision 2020" (Wawasan 2020) placed high-technology, especially Information and Computer Technology (ICT) at the centre of the country's transformation, in line with the notions of "Knowledge Society" and "Knowledge Economy." Within the political framework of that period, the government discourse was propagated through government agencies and institutions, including schools, universities, and the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), as well as by the media controlled by or in sympathy of the government. Positive visions of high technology in the future Malaysia were soon to be found in many publications, including in the now booming genre of science fiction for the youth. This article examines several of these textual scientific and technical imaginaries, including the novel Panrita by Arena Wati (1993), as well as popular science fiction novels and short stories.It is found that often the plot centres on the notion of a journey. The youth novels mostly depict a concrete trip to planets and galaxies far away, while in one case, a time-machine brings the juvenile heroes to an early 20th century Malay anti-colonial struggle against the British. In these journeys, the utopian vehicles symbolise Malay/Malaysian agency and competence in science and high technology, being at par with other developed nations. In the award-winning novel Panrita, the voyage through these new Technoenvironments also encompasses a deep spiritual and religious meaning within Malaysian Islam. Given the great political emphasis on Malay language and culture in this period, de-centring away from the Anglosphere, the question is raised whether in the Malaysian case the English term should be localised, e.g. by the Malay term "lingkungan teknikal", building on previous theoretical contributions in Malay, including that of Sohaimi Abdul Aziz (2013) on "teknoteks" (technotext).
This article discusses the localised provision of basic services (health, education, livelihood support) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, by taking the case of SONJO, a digital mutual aid community in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Through a Foucauldian governmentality analytical lens, we argue that SONJO showcases contradictory ways in which a locally and digitally self-governed community supports citizens' welfare and well-being during a crisis. On the one hand, the community facilitates redistribution of resources by its leaders and members, ensuring the delivery of social services to those most in need. On the other hand, the community's activation of localised practices of sambatan-rural Javanese practices of mobilising common resources in time of need-normalises the neoliberal transfer of state responsibilities and decision-making for basic services to citizens. The case study helps unpack the intertwining of neoliberal ideas-which champion individuals as self-reliant actors-and Javanese principles of harmony that emphasise social togetherness, communality, and empathy. Together, they render acceptable the unpaid labour of community members in managing services for fellow citizens within a local context marked by pervasive precarious work, underdeveloped welfare support, and recurrent natural disasters that disrupt livelihoods.
This article analyzes the role the transnational and colonial legacies in Siamese collecting practices in the nineteenth century and twentieth century. Through the case study of a Ganesha statue (Phra Phi Ganet) from Candi Singosari near Malang, East-Java, in the Bangkok National Museum (Phiphitthaphanthasathan Haeng Chat Phra Nakhon), this article argues that king Chulalongkorn, on his second trip to Java in 1896, was an active actor who was able to benefit from the Dutch lack of professionalisation in Javanese collecting practices to gather a large amount of objects, which he utilised to foster the creation of Thai national modernity and identity. As such, it argues we must understand this dynamic not as pure Westernisation but rather a refraction of the colonial model of Java, where Thai national identity was built on objects from outside Siamese borders. Based on the diary of Chulalongkorn as well as Dutch, Indonesian, and Thai archival sources, it shows how Chulalongkorn collected objects of Hindu-Buddhist nature that fitted his interest and legitimacy for royal authority, cemented by 1926. By doing so, this research allows us to reconsider the colonial collecting practices outside the coloniser-colonised dichotomy, the transnational aspect of modern nation-building, and their implications for museums across Southeast Asia and Europe today.
This article examines contemporary expressions of human to more-than-human interaction through the lens of technoenvironments, understood as evolving networks that bind non-animate and animate life together, shaped by mutual agency, care, and resistance. We relate technoenvironments both to multinatural cosmologies recounting mythical origins of human society in Southeast Asia through the union of mountains and the sea, and to modern approaches derived from contemporary feminist political ecology. We explore performative practices which express and shape understandings of the co-becoming of humans and more-than-humans at case studies in Indonesia and Vietnam. The first analyses an art performance in Yogyakarta Indonesia, where participants from different classes, genders, and educational backgrounds co-create mandalas articulating their imaginaries of organic agriculture. Beans, plantlets, soil and plastics became actants in their own right. The second case studies performative protests by diverse citizens of Hanoi - students, families with children, artists, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community - in response to plans to fell more than 6,000 trees. This challenged the hegemony of science-based discourse by affirming the mutual affective relationships between humans and trees. In both cases, living matter such as trees, plants, seeds, and soil becomes agents in the performative representation of people's entanglements with their more-than-human environment. We compare the performativity of environmental protest and art along the dimensions of 1) representation, 2) creative expression, and 3) multispecies relations. To conclude, we reflect on how the cosmologies of Southeast Asia inform current multispecies relationships in the context of technoenvironments both in Indonesia and Vietnam.
Vietnam's foreign policy - centred on multilateralisation, diversification, and international integration - has transformed the country's economic fortunes and elevated its international standing. Throughout the Doi Moi era, Vietnam has cultivated a strong network of bilateral and multilateral frameworks to further its economic aspirations and protect its national sovereignty. It has leveraged astute diplomacy to navigate challenges and seize opportunities. Since the Thirteenth National Party Congress, which set a goal for Vietnam to become a developed nation by 2045, these challenges have become increasingly pronounced. Protectionism, great-power politics, an undermining of the rules-based order, ever-present tensions in the South China Sea, as well as pandemic- and war-related disruptions to supply chains, have complicated Vietnam's quest for national security and its effort to ensure peace and stability in pursuit of its economic targets. Amidst such a fraught environment, strategic autonomy has become a buzzword among smaller states that seek to maintain the benefits of interdependence while actively alleviating the risks associated with heightened geopolitical tensions and dependent relationships. Scholars of Vietnamese foreign policy likewise argue that Vietnam's foreign policy seeks to bolster its strategic autonomy. However, little effort has been made to clarify what exactly this entails. The present study defines the concept in the Vietnamese context by asking, "Where and how does Vietnam seek to strengthen its strategic autonomy?" It argues that Vietnam's pursuit rests on three core components, which it examines through Vietnam's responses to US-China rivalry, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the country's evolving approach to infrastructure development, energy security, and foreign direct investment.
This paper examines Thailand's evolving policy toward Cambodia during the Cold War through the lens of strategic narrative. While conventional accounts emphasise geopolitical rivalry and threat perception, this study argues that Thailand's foreign policy was equally shaped by the discursive construction of meaning. Drawing on archival documents, political memoirs, media analysis, and academic debates, the paper traces how successive administrations-Kriangsak (1977-1980), Prem (1980-1988), and Chatichai (1988-1991)-reframed the Cambodian conflict to legitimise controversial policies, including cooperation with the Khmer Rouge.Kriangsak's narrative of a neutral "situation in Cambodia" justified Thailand's cautious diplomacy while concealing covert assistance to the Khmer Rouge. Under Prem, the conflict was redefined as an "international crisis," enabling alignment with ASEAN, China, and the United States while framing Khmer Rouge participation in the CGDK coalition as patriotic resistance. Chatichai's "marketplace" narrative marked a departure from ideological posturing, emphasizing economic engagement and regional integration.By analyzing these shifting frames, the paper demonstrates how narratives functioned as instruments of realpolitik, shaping public opinion, forging alliances, and legitimizing policies that often subordinated humanitarian concerns. Thailand's case underscores the constructivist insight that power in international relations operates not only through material capabilities but also through the politics of interpretation.
This study examined resilience to flooding in Hoi An Ancient Town, a historical World Heritage Site in Vietnam. The town has been affected by flooding since at least the 17th century, and floods have recently increased in frequency and severity under the impacts of climate change and urban development. This study used the Adversity Acceptance as Resilience framework, which focuses on people's abilities to comprehend, acknowledge, and adapt to challenges, to analyse the results of empirical research comprising on-site observations, examinations of historical and contemporary documents, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. The long experience that Hoi An residents have with flooding has informed a community understanding that is closely tied to different stages of predicting, preparing for, coping with, and recovering from floods. Residents have learned to predict the onset and retreat of floods by observing changes in the natural environment, adapted the layout and architecture of the town to flooding, and developed comprehensive measures to prepare for flooding each year. This proactive and holistic approach to flood management is deeply rooted in transgenerational knowledge, as exemplified by the flood marks provided on buildings to serve as both symbolic reminders of previous floods and indicators of possible flooding scenarios. Advances in modern technology have allowed weather forecasts and social media to play significant roles in flood management strategies as well. Finally, floods have even been incorporated into the tourism experiences offered by the town. Indeed, floods are woven into Hoi An's identity, illustrating how environmental challenges can be transformed into opportunities for cultural sustainability.
The revival of Confucianism in China reflects an effort to infuse soft power with moral authority and signals an attempt to turn ethical credibility into political legitimacy amid strategic ambition. This study examines the reception of China's Confucian moral diplomacy in Southeast Asia, a region shaped by diverse ethical and religious traditions. Drawing on data from the sixth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey, the analysis explores how Confucian social ethics and political values affect perceptions of China's influence at domestic, regional, and global levels, and how these relationships vary with democracy, economic ties, and territorial disputes. The results show that moral integrity, not cultural familiarity, sustains acceptance. Social ethics foster approval only when China's actions demonstrate reciprocity and sincerity, whereas political Confucianism, rooted in hierarchy and competence, gains traction under conditions of stability and cooperation. Across contexts, Confucianism functions less as a cultural export than as a moral framework guiding how publics interpret conduct. The findings reveal a broader transformation in international politics, suggesting power now depends more on the integrity of behaviour than on the allure of culture.
Contemporary research on politics and elections in Southeast Asia focuses heavily on clientelism in its analysis. Such analyses emphasise the rising importance of "brokers" who connect politicians to voters, often through vote-buying or other forms of corruption and dependency. Here we argue that the broker system can only be a temporary phenomenon, capable of reinforcing clientelistic ties in the short term, but subject to ongoing erosion of the same shifting relationships that made brokers necessary. Indeed, we argue, the broker system is already being replaced by different forms of networks that are less subject to vertical hierarchies and personal ties. This article examines the changing dynamics of political organisation in contemporary Thailand, concentrating on familial dynasties, Red Shirts, and student networks. The study argues that modern communication technologies enabled and political events motivated the creation of new types of networks to challenge the established clientelistic relationships. The Red Shirts network combines vertical patron-client relationships with horizontal, community-focused interactions afforded by modern media. Students' networks have largely abandoned traditional hierarchical structures in favour of more egalitarian, decentralised, and online-oriented organisational forms. Even familial dynasties, which have relied most heavily on brokers, have begun to adapt new techniques to supplement their use of brokers. The article concludes that emerging participatory political networks, founded on innovative technologies and adaptive strategies and shaped by class, regional, and generational disparities, are transforming political engagement in Thailand and challenging the entrenched clientelistic relations that underpin the current conservative social order.
The emergence of a cohort of Malaysia-born writers producing works in English from metropolitan centres in the West alongside a growing body of Mahua (or Malaysian Chinese) literature, whose practitioners are ethnic Chinese based primarily in Taiwan and writing in Chinese, constitutes two principal trajectories in contemporary Malaysian literature. Yet, comparative discussions between Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literatures remain scarce. This paper seeks to address this gap by proposing the Nanyang (literally, the "South Seas") as a decolonial framework that reveals how these literatures delink from colonial legacies and state-centric imaginaries while enacting epistemic disobedience through pluriversal engagement. The Nanyang as a pluriverse does not merely entail the coexistence of these distinct literary traditions but emerges as a non-hierarchical space of convergence for Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysia, both in the literary worlds constructed by their authors and the cultural spaces they inhabit. By examining Tash Aw and Ng Kim Chew as exemplars of Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literary trajectories, respectively, this paper illustrates how these marginalised literary traditions converge through complex negotiations of nationalist, global, and diasporic hegemonies, reimagining the Nanyang as a pluriverse of routes and relationality. This reframing also positions the Nanyang as a site of "stateless poetics" and the "diasporic local," concepts that challenge institutionalised paradigms of Malaysian literary and cultural production, which continue to marginalise non-Malay linguistic traditions. The paper concludes by gesturing to other Southeast Asian littoral imaginaries to support ongoing Global South dialogues on relationality, plurilingualism, and decolonial aesthetics.
The current article deals with the legal discourse of intellectual property and copyright and their relationship with the narratives of pirekua composers on creativity, authorship and property in the sphere of P'urhepecha traditional music. The pirekuas are songs, sung in the P'urhepecha language, which narrate different aspects of life in the communities of this indigenous people situated in the state of Michoacan in the west of Mexico. Research results allow us to see the impact of intellectual property and copyright discourse in P'urhepecha singers which recreate the dominant idea of an individual author and hence of an individualised ownership of the musical work, but at the same time show the heterogeneity of meanings which question this vision. Qualitative research was carried out between 2020 and 2023, in different P'urhepecha communities of the Sierra region. Those interviewed were adults between 40 and 80 years of age. Interviews were complemented by ethnographic work for their further analysis.
Based on an extensive search of sites and tools that allow for the administration of sound-both musical and non-musical-through the Internet, this article outlines an abstract model that seeks to account for the key features of networked sound management on a global scale. To this end, and in order to understand and represent in a simplified way a constantly transforming set of roles, practices, relationships, and technologies, a handful of concepts are used, either created or redefined ad hoc: global sound archive, sound administrator, sound niches, insurgent technologies, counter-obsolescence, among others. The model assumes the existence of an environment in which users struggle for control of sound, and in which, despite the disparity of powers at play, constant strategies of control and insurgency are developed to either reinforce or break down the technological and legal barriers that stand between them and the sound
Women have played an important role since the beginning of the hip hop movement, but as the spread of the ideas of feminism has expanded, their role has become significantly politicized. This article analyzes the work of four Central American feminist hip hop artists to highlight their reading of their political context. Based on the analysis of the lyrics of her songs from the last five years, several central themes are found in her works: Central America as a place of enunciation, the body and self-love as a political act, the social mandates of the feminine, the fight against patriarchal violence, the body-territory and migration.
This article presents the results of the research carried out on the presence of Ibero-American women musicians in the Egon Ludwig record collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin. Using as sources the Latin American popular music records of the twentieth century from thirteen countries whose official language is Spanish, this study addresses the presence of Ibero-American women musicians in three categories of analysis: musical dissidence, gender dissidence and political dissidence. To this end, three elements of each selected album are examined: the album cover, the musical and/or textual content of the album, and the biographical profile of a selection of women present in this collection who evidence these dissidences. Of the seventy-two women musicians found in the collection, twelve selected as representative case studies of the dissidence present in this collection are analyzed from the point of view of gender studies and critical discography
This article examines the role of transcription within ethnomusicology, situating it as both a crucial methodological tool and a site for critical dialogue between transcribers and musicians. While acknowledging the historical critiques of transcription's subjectivity and potential for misrepresentation, it advocates for a collaborative approach that fosters (hard) conversations about musical structure, inspiration, authorship, and cultural context. The author proposes a framework wherein transcribers and musicians work together to refine and discuss transcriptions, echoing the collaborative efforts of Richard Widdess and Ritwik Sanyal (Widdess 1994) and Phillip Ciantar and Frans Baldacchino (Ciantar 1996) in their exploration of improvised performance. Drawing on his interactions with Letieres Leite, the late director of Orkestra Rumpilezz, the author reaffirms transcription's relevance in contemporary ethnomusicological research while addressing the complexities of (mis)representation in musical analysis.
Across the world, hydropower dams that seek to tame and commodify water are sites of intense contestation, as global capital and development agendas often face staunch localised resistance. This is acutely evident in Myanmar, where water politics is a microcosm of competing visions for the country's governance and development. Locally-led alliances pursuing self-determination and inclusive politics are pitted against the central state's rapacious approach to development, backed by violence and foreign capital. These dynamics exist amidst an influx of international aid, providing an illuminating site for examining the intersection of aid politics, development ideology, and subaltern resistance.This paper contributes to these thematic areas by examining the contestation of hydropower hegemony in Myanmar and centring civil society actors' agency. It utilises what the authors call 'solidarity scholarship' that rejects detached positivism to deploy an epistemological belief in embedding solidarity throughout the research process for making sense of resistance and power. The paper examines how domestic opposition has gone beyond anti-dam to being uniquely propositional; rivers have become symbols of unity and resistance against uneven development and military violence. Focused on Myitsone and the Salween River, the paper elucidates how the respective campaigns galvanised not only civil society solidarity, but also the potential for re-imagining governance and development in Myanmar. This has implications for understanding subaltern resistance across many contexts globally, particularly where exploitation disguised as development is prevalent.
This ethnographic article shows how state institutions in Malaysia classify certain spiritual practices undertaken at the graves of former religious leaders or prophets as superstitious (khurafat) and, therewith, unacceptable in Islam. Many people believe in a "super-power" (keramat) that the dead person had and in the miracles that surrounded them. However, the way the superpower is dealt with at the graves varies greatly depending on the religious and ethnic background of the people. Indian Malaysians make sense of their worshipping practices at the keramat graves on the basis of the conflation between Hindu and Islamic elements. Most Muslim Malays, however, consider this to be against the Islamic sources (Qur'an and Hadith). The meaning they assign to visiting keramat graves and practising rites at these places is characterised by an ambiguity that is reflected in the respect and adoration of the Islamic scholars and the simultaneous refusal to show it - not least because of a revitalisation of Islam in the nation-state. Thus, against the backdrop of syncretic, multireligious and political traditions in Malaysia, the ideological orientation of Islam, as well as the perception of what is considered to be superstitious and magical, is the decisive factor for a canalising, disciplining or even repressive form of handling religious and spiritual practices at the keramat graves.
