Böcker i Research in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series-serien

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics.

China has been an important player in the international economy for two thousand years and has historically exerted enormous influence over the development and nature of political and economic affairs in the regions beyond its borders, especially its neighbors.Sino-Malay

Randai, the popular folk theater tradition of the Minangkabau ethnic group in West Sumatra, has evolved to include influences of martial arts, storytelling, and folk songs.

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history.

From Jail to Jail is the political autobiography of Sutan Ibrahim gelar Tan Malaka, an enigmatic and colorful political thinker of twentieth-century Asia, who was one of the most influential figures of the Indonesian Revolution. Variously labeled a communist, Trotskyite, and nationalist, Tan Malaka managed to run afoul of nearly every political group and faction involved in the Indonesian struggle for independence. During his decades of political activity, he spent periods of exile and hiding in nearly every country in Southeast Asia. As a Marxist who was expelled from and became a bitter enemy of his country's Communist Party and as a nationalist who was imprisoned and murdered by his own government's forces as a danger to its anticolonial struggle, Tan Malaka was and continues to be soaked in contradiction and controversy.

Scholarship on the musical traditions of Indonesia has long focused on practices from Java and Bali, including famed gamelan traditions, at the expense of the wide diversity of other musical forms within the archipelago.

This diary, begun after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and covering the invasion of Burma up to June 1942, is a moving account of the dilemmas faced by the well-loved and prolific Burmese author Theippan Maung Wa (a pseudonym of U Sein Tin) and his family.

Passionate Revolutions examines the role of political emotions and media in the rise and fall of the Marcos regime. Focusing on the sentimental stories and melodramatic cultural politics of the press and cinema, Espiritu discusses how aesthetics helped secure the dictator's control and fuel the popular struggles that led to his overthrow.

Analyzes the ways in which, between 1985 and 1998, modern theatre practitioners in Indonesia contributed to a rising movement of social protest against the long-governing New Order regime of President Suharto and examines the work of groups from Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta that pioneered new forms of theatre-making.

Ma Ma Lay's 1955 novel of the marriage between a rural teenager to a powerful Anglophile twenty years her senior, set in prewar Burma, is an engaging drama, finely observed work of social realism, and stirring rejection of Western cultural dominance by Burma's foremost female author and one of its preeminent voices for change.

Women's status in rural Java can appear contradictory to those both inside and outside the culture. In some ways, women have high status and broad access to resources, but other situations suggest that Javanese women lack real power and autonomy.

Burma's Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power describes a transformation in Buddhist practice in contemporary Burma. This revitalization movement has had real consequences for how the oppressive military junta, in power since the early 1960s, governs the country.

"e;Children see and hear what is there; adults see and hear what they are expected to and mainly remember what they think they ought to remember,"e; David Lowenthal wrote in The Past Is a Foreign Country. It is on this fraught foundation that Fred Lanzing builds this memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp for Dutch colonialists in the East Indies during the World War II.When published in the Netherlands in 2007, the book triggered controversy, if not vitriol, for Lanzing's assertion that his time in the camp was not the compendium of horrors commonly associated with the Dutch internment experience. Despite the angry reception, Lanzing's account corresponds more closely with the scant historical record than do most camp memoirs. In this way, Lanzing's work is a substantial addition to ongoing discussions of the politics of memory and the powerful-if contentious-contributions that subjective accounts make to historiography and to the legacies of the past.Lanzing relates an aspect of the war in the Pacific seldom discussed outside the Netherlands and, by focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, expands our understanding of World War II in general. His compact, beautifully detailed account will be accessible to undergraduate students and a general readership and, together with the introduction by William H. Frederick, is a significant contribution to literature on World War II, the Dutch colonial experience, the history of childhood, and Southeast Asian history.

Wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, connects a mythic past to the present through public ritual performance and is one of most important performance traditions in Bali. The dalang, or puppeteer, is revered in Balinese society as a teacher and spiritual leader. Recently, women have begun to study and perform in this traditionally male role, an innovation that has triggered resistance and controversy.In Women in the Shadows, Jennifer Goodlander draws on her own experience training as a dalang as well as interviews with early women dalang and leading artists to upend the usual assessments of such gender role shifts. She argues that rather than assuming that women performers are necessarily mounting a challenge to tradition, "e;tradition"e; in Bali must be understood as a system of power that is inextricably linked to gender hierarchy.She examines the very idea of "e;tradition"e; and how it forms both an ideological and social foundation in Balinese culture. Ultimately, Goodlander offers a richer, more complicated understanding of both tradition and gender in Balinese society. Following in the footsteps of other eminent reflexive ethnographies, Women in the Shadows will be of value to anyone interested in performance studies, Southeast Asian culture, or ethnographic methods.

During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Viet Nam News, Ha Noi's English-language newspaper, Huu Ngoc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country's rich history, culture, and daily life.With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Ha u Nga c is among Via t Nam's keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author's central theme-that all tradition is change through acculturation-twines through each of the book's ten sections, which contain Ha u Nga c's ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Via t Nam today.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, seven members of the Quimpo family dedicated themselves to the anti-Marcos resistance in the Philippines, sometimes at profound personal cost. In this unprecedented memoir, eight siblings (plus one by marriage) tell their remarkable stories in individually authored chapters that comprise a family saga of revolution, persistence, and, ultimately, vindication, even as easy resolution eluded their struggles.Subversive Lives tells of attempts to smuggle weapons for the New People's Army (the armed branch of the Communist Party of the Philippines); of heady times organizing uprisings and strikes; of the cruel discovery of one brother's death and the inexplicable disappearance of another (now believed to be dead); and of imprisonment and torture by the military. These stories show the sacrifices and daily heroism of those in the movement. But they also reveal its messy legacies: sons alienated from their father; daughters abused by the military; friends betrayed; and revolutionary affection soured by intractable ideological differences.The rich and distinctive contributions span the martial law years of Ferdinand Marcos's rule. Subversive Lives is a riveting and accessible primer for those unfamiliar with the era, and a resonant history for those with a personal connection to what it meant to be Filipino at that time, or for anyone who has fought political repression.

Social scientists have long recognized many apparent contradictions in the Minangkabau. The world's largest matrilineal people, they are also strongly Islamic and, as a society, remarkably modern and outward looking.

Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, "Tensions of Empire" focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia.

Like a number of Netherlanders in the post-World War II era, Inez Hollander only gradually became aware of her family's connections with its Dutch colonial past, including a Creole great-grandmother.

The Indonesian economy, took shape as part of the colonial transformation of the archipelago by the Dutch in the mid-nineteenth century. This book identifies key actors and analyzes long-term changes in agricultural production and rural society, examining how they shaped the national Indonesian economy.

Increased interest in Indonesian culture and politics is reflected in this work's effort to advance and reject various notions of what it means to be Indonesian. It also addresses perceptions of how Indonesia's citizens and state officials should interact.

In 1500 Malay Malacca was the queen city of the Malay Archipelago, one of the great trade centers of the world. Its rulers, said to be descendents of the ancient line of Srivijaya, dominated the lands east and west of the straits. The Portuguese, unable to compete in the marketplace, captured the town.

Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya.

A collections of 70 poems from one of Malaya's leading poets, that depict longing, loneliness, modernization, and insights in Malaysian culture.

How does the language of poetry conspire with the language of power? This title deals with Indonesia and the Philippines in the early modern and post-1945 periods. It examines the literature and politics of Indonesia and Philippines from the point of view of contemporary thinking.

During the Ayutthaya period in Thailand (1350-1767), a group of meters based upon specific types and arrangements of syllables became a significant part of the Thai literary corpus.

Considering the size and importance of Indonesia, remarkably little has been published in the West about the society and government of that country. With over 160 million people, it is the fifth most populous country in the world.

According to Tuan, however, South Vietnam in the last decade of its life developed considerable governmental cohesion and internal social strength. This title addresses a common perception of Vietnam: that South Vietnam was a fragmented society which did not deserve to succeed because of its internal weaknesses.