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The recurring trope of female purity holds an important place in the Sino-Malay literature of colonial Java from the late 1910s to the 1930s, a turbulent and transformative sociopolitical period that also saw the rise of Tionghoa (Chinese) nationalism in the Dutch Indies. Used mainly by male writers who dominated the Sino-Malay literary scene, the gendered trope features polarised femininities--the archetypal virtuous Tionghoa girl, and the Westernised modern girl who defies Confucian traditions--and reflects the male perspectives and sexism of the time. I contend, however, that the trope reveals ideological motivations that go beyond patriarchal concerns, as it is also employed to articulate and perpetuate nationalist and anti-colonial ideas and views. Using theories of gender and nation as well as anthropological concepts of purity and pollution, I examine how the female body's inscribed purity draws on embedded epistemologies of race and gender to represent Tionghoa identity and nationalism in two male-authored Sino-Malay novels, Liem Hian Bing's Valentine Chan atawa rahasia Semarang (1926) and Tan Chieng Lian's Oh..... Papa! (1929). As my readings show, female purity as a nationalist ideology validates Tionghoa masculinity as the defender and guardian of not just woman's virtue, but also of an imagined morally and culturally superior Tionghoa nation., In the Dutch Indies from the late 1910s till the 1930s, women's independence, agency, and bodies became a subject of heated debates and contestations among the local-born, acculturated Peranakan Chinese [...]

This article considers the implications of the popularisation of Facebook groups that share historical photographs for the writing of Thai national and photographic histories. Rather than dismissing these groups as lacking in historical rigour, I propose that the nostalgic impetus behind their formation indicates an important way through which we may rethink the continued relevance of Thailand's history to its current sociopolitical situation. Drawing from Craig J. Reynolds' (1992) argument regarding the interrelationship between the 'plot of Thai history' and the narrative historical form, I consider how this plot might be challenged or displaced through a movement from text to image, and from the material to the digital., The advent of social media in Thailand, as elsewhere, is intimately related with notions of the contemporary. The 'present-ness' of social media has meant that previous studies of its role [...]

Lord Reid played a vital role as chairman in a Commonwealth commission in framing the Malayan Independence constitution between 1956 and 1957. The Scottish Lord of Appeal sought to ensure the commission's impartiality and to achieve a fair balance between the demands of the various interest groups. The Federation of Malaya was a complex emerging nation-state with a diverse population and the framers had to manage competing interests and demands. This article, through a close examination of the primary constitutional documents, considers Reid's influence on the framing of the Malayan (and hence, Malaysian) federal constitution. The article begins with a brief discussion of Lord Reid's appointment to head the commission and then considers in some depth areas where his influence on the framing of the draft constitution is evident. The article argues that Reid was the main playmaker and moderator during the constitution-framing process and played a critical role in ensuring a balance was achieved between the competing demands of the federal government and the states, safeguarding the fundamental rights of the citizens against the state, and in moderating the various communal demands., Constitutions often have an idiosyncratic element; this is not discernible in their formal text, but is evident in the primary records of their drafting. The views of the framers and [...]

This article examines gotong royong as social citizenship in the second half of the twentieth century in Indonesia. Gotong royong was traditionally understood as a collective spirit among neighbours to strengthen economic and social resilience. However, the institutionalisation of the system through massive development programmes since the 1940s has influenced the common people's perception and practice of it. This article argues that the co-option of gotong royong as part of the discourse of nation-state building transformed the popular view of labour and capital mobilisation from an openly critical stance to apparent submission. Gotong royong became a means of social engineering and an ingenious linguistic strategy by which state elites orchestrated control over the making of citizens. Still, Indonesians have remained vigilant of their participation in gotong royong, and about the potential for its misuse by corrupt officials., Most Indonesians understand the concept of gotong royong as a traditional mechanism of mutual help, such as when men help their neighbours after a natural disaster and women work collectively [...]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss the various articles published within the issue on such topics as colonialism, nationalism, and race.

The mother of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Princess Mother Sangwan, was the royal patron of the Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP) and an ardent supporter of its Cold War era civic action programmes. This article surveys the special relationship between the Princess Mother and the BPP and their development of royal projects among the highland minorities in northern Thailand to illuminate the implications of this collaboration for the spread of royalist nationalism and the evolving role of the monarchy from the 1960s to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quezon City was founded in 1939 as a planned city and envisioned as the future capital of the Philippines, which was anticipating its independence in a few years. Led by President Manuel Quezon, Philippine politicians conferred upon the city narratives of nationhood and social justice to make it the best spatial representation of a nation-in-waiting. However, underneath these state-centric ideologies was the authoritarianism of the Quezon regime, which used urban politics to centralise power. But far from being a symbol of the President's undisputed dominance, Quezon City's inherent contradictions became weak points in the city's official narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opening of the nithan khun bulom genre of texts is usually regarded as a mythic account of Lao history. But the process by which Lao historians themselves began to perceive this was an important nationalist project of the elite during the Royal Lao Government (RLG) period. As early as the 1920s, Lao authors began rewriting the old folktales into a new, modern, scientific account of the past, the ‘birth of the Lao race’. By studying elite writings in the RLG period I show that Lao nationalism was more modernist and autonomous than previously recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the turn of the century up until the 1930s, public education under Dutch rule in Indonesia developed both quantitatively and qualitatively, but this expansion was interrupted, and even reversed, by the onset of the Great Depression. Focusing on schoolteachers in particular, this essay examines the trajectory of education policies in colonial Indonesia in response to the crisis, from the initial measures, to partial recovery in the mid-1930s, up to the Japanese invasion of 1942. The crisis ushered in the policy of indigenisation, which saw large-scale education reorganisation, including the substitution of European teachers with much lower paid Indonesians. Indigenisation was also a political response to the spreading of nationalist ideals through the growing number of independent schools run by Taman Siswa and the Muhammadiyah. Hence, the intention was also to transform Indonesian teachers into cultural agents who would propagate a government-formulated concept of cultural identity among their own community. However, indigenisation contributed to the gradual delegitimisation of colonial authority through the exodus of well-educated Indonesians who had been intended as docile imperial subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates how multicultural citizenship education is taught in a Chinese Christian school in Jakarta, where multiculturalism is not a natural experience. Schoolyard ethnographic research was deployed to explore the reality of a ‘double minority’ — Chinese Christians — and how the citizenship of this marginal group is constructed and contested in national, school, and familial discourses. The article argues that it is necessary for schools to actively implement multicultural citizenship education in order to create a new generation of young adults who are empowered, tolerant, active, participatory citizens of Indonesia. As schools are a microcosm of the nation-state, successful multicultural citizenship education can have real societal implications for it has the potential to render the idealism enshrined in the national motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ a lived reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines knowledge production about malaria in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam. During the 1920s and 1930s, medical doctors cooperated with plantation managers in order to develop industrial hygiene techniques consisting of environmental modification and quinine use. By the 1930s, changing motivations, in particular racial hygiene and patriotism, drove malaria control efforts. The wartime pressures to control malaria between the 1940s and 1975 further encouraged patriotic hygiene. This history of malaria science in Vietnam highlights the tension between change and continuity and shows the importance of place in the conjunction of scientific knowledge production and nation-building projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article recounts the unusual history of a national idea in late colonial Singapore from the 1930s to the early 1950s before Singapore's attainment of partial self-government in 1955. Using two different concepts, namely ‘colonial nationalism’ and ‘imperial citizenship’, it offers a genealogy of nationalism in Singapore, one that calls into question the applicability of prevailing theories of anti-colonial nationalism to the Singapore-in-Malaya context. Focusing on colonial nationalism, the article provides a historical account of English-mediated official multiculturalism through tracking shifting British colonial priorities, ideologies of governance and challenges to its authority in Singapore. This account is rarely appreciated in Singapore today given official scripting of national history that abets particular amnesias with regards to its multicultural nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anti-Chinese riots broke out in Rangoon on 26 June 1967. The riots, which resulted from Chinese students' defiance of the Burmese government's ban on wearing Mao badges in school, led to the deterioration of Sino–Burmese relations, symbolised by the cessation of ‘Pauk Phaw’ ties and the subsequent shift in China's foreign policy which included open intervention in Burma's civil war. The riots contributed to estranged relations between Beijing and Rangoon throughout the 1970s and 1980s despite the normalisation of bilateral ties in 1970. While the roots of the Rangoon riots lay in Burma's political economy and tensions within the local Chinese community in the context of Cold War international relations, Beijing bore primary responsibility, however, due to its export of the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conventional historiography presumes a linear development from urbanisation, the rise of indigenous middle classes and the spread of modernity towards nationalism as the logical outcome of this process. This article aims to disconnect modernity from nationalism by focusing on the role of cultural citizens in the late colonial period for whom modernity was a desirable lifestyle. The extent to which their desires and the interests of the colonial regime coincided is illustrated by a variety of advertisements and school posters, which invited members of the indigenous urban middle class to become cultural citizens of the colony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Shan State Army-South (SSA-S) is today one of Burma's largest remaining ethnic opposition armies. This paper investigates ethnic politics of the SSA-S and their strategic use of media. It argues that Shan insurgency today has moved into a new phase characterised by its intense involvement with mass media. The paper examines, on the production side, the Shan insurgency's media products and its networking with the Thai press. On the reception side, it explores how the images of ethnic insurgency are consumed by Shan audiences living in exile, analysing how long-distance Shan nationalism is generated through the spectatorship of these ‘militarised’ images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of the formation of national identity have highlighted the importance of national pilgrimages, akin to sacred religious pilgrimages. However, less attention has been paid to the effect of religious pilgrimages on national identities. In this article, I examine the ways that religious pilgrimages have shaped identities in the Jawi community, particularly early in the twentieth century, when nationalism spread through Southeast Asia. Given the deeply personal nature of pilgrimages, I do this primarily through an exploration of the religious pilgrimage and later life of one well-known leader from Pattani, Haji Sulong Abdulkadir al-Fatani. I find that this approach leads to a more nuanced consideration of the ways that plural identities, even conflicting plural identities, are often held by individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior to World War Two many of the Malay-language films released in Singapore and Malaya were made in Java and the Philippines. Beginning in 1940 the Shaw Brothers began producing Malay films in Singapore for distribution to their theatre network throughout Malaya. The first Malay film magazine, Film Melayu, which began publishing in May 1941, documented the production and release of a number of these pre-war films in Singapore, providing one of the few avenues for a better understanding of the origins of Malay cinema. More importantly, this periodical was firmly ensconced within the Malay publishing community and thus reflects debates over issues ranging from the proper script to use in publishing to technology and its relationship to the nation (or community, bangsa). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses shifting politics within the Vietnamese nationalist movement in 1948. The author explains that these were the result of changes in international politics, in French-Vietnamese relations, and in the relationship between non-communist and communist leaders within the Viêt Minh state. The party ideologues within the state are examined. The author states that 1948 marked the end of the "united front" period and cooperation with bourgeois nationalists. The article also mentions the national coalition which led the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DVR).

This article reviews the scholarship surrounding rebellion and resistance to government in Burma, specifically the Saya Sen revolt of the 1930s. The combination of religion and revolution is unique to Southeast Asia, and this particular uprising epitomizes this mixture of influences. Scholars have tried to trace how the region's religions helped create and channel nationalism, anti-colonialism and resistance. The author examines the historiography of the rebellion and how it has been conceptualized since.

The article focuses on the contribution Prince Phetsarath Ratanavongsa in the making of Modern Laos. How a specific idea about Laos and its culture was formed under French colonial rule and nurtured under the Japanese occupation and its aftermath was highlighted. Phetsarath's understanding of Lao cultural nationalism was transformed into a political and anticolonial nationalism.

The article explores the roots of violence when a Cambodian mob burned down the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. An argument is presented on the link of the anti-Thai riots to a set of discourses and imagery which have been central to assertions of Khmerness or national identity. It explores the origins of such an imagery as it was evoked both during the riot and in subsequent discussion of the violence.

The article discusses the significance of the status of women, Westernization and the origins of modern theater in Vietnam. The context of the intellectual and social upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s has uncovered the modern spoken theater, according to the author. The status of women, the effects of Westernization and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism have been focused during this period.

Examines assumptions that the expansion of public education is a tool in the promotion of national identity and the mitigation of ethno-religious tensions in diverse post-colonial states such as the Philippines. Examination of successive efforts by the Philippine government to deploy educational policy as a response to chronic tensions between the nation's Christian mainstream and a restive Muslim minority in the southern part of the country; Suggestions that the expansion of education to foster a cohesive national identity.

Attempts to illuminate the ways of thought which were in conflict with Western nationalist ideas. Importance of the transformation of thoughts for the development of the nationalist thought in Vietnam; Failure of scholars to equate the worldviews of both Vietnamese national identity and the Western idea of nationalism; Facilitation of the nationalist idea in Vietnam through the existence of an early form of national identity.

New Indonesian decentralisation policies have generated strong localisation movements which recall regional history. During the Soeharto years history was invoked as part of an homogenising nationalism. With recent changes in the city of Makassar that process is being reversed to strengthen local participation in redefined national structures.

This article attempts to bring together literature about the typology of nationalism, with the ways in which 'Malay' or 'Melayu' have been used as the core of an ethnie or a nationalist project. Different meanings of ?Melayu? were salient at different times in Sumatra, in the Peninsula and in the eastern Archipelago, and the Dutch and British used their respective translations of it very differently. Modern ethno-nationalist projects in Malaysia and Brunei made ?Melayu? a contested and often divisive concept, whereas its translation into the hitherto empty term ?Indonesia? might have provided an easier basis for territorial, or even ultimately civic, nationalism in that country.

Focuses on the development of nationalism and modernity in Bali Island, Indonesia. Definition of modernity; Assessment of the essay written by author G.N.M. Wirjasutha on the caste system; Institutions essential in traditional Bali; Factors influencing the modernization.

An introduction is presented which discusses articles within the issue on topics including Indonesian theatre from the 1950s through 2012, nationalism in Singapore during the 1930s and the impact of education and literature on youth.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles published within the issue including one on the drug trade in Burma, one regarding Asian nationalism in Indonesia, and one about cultural transformation in Thailand.