Many of the national leaders associated with the Non-Aligned Movement in both Asia and Africa wrote widely-disseminated autobiographies. Though influential, these narratives are frequently neglected by both historical and literary studies of decolonization, yet they form a dense intertextual network, each building on and responding to its predecessors. National autobiographies written by figures such as …

WPS 13 Imagined Individuals: National Autobiography and Postcolonial Self-Fashioning Read More »

This paper argues against a tendency to see Southeast Asian Studies as a recent, shallow and essentially foreign construct.   It surveys an older pattern of writing about the region as a whole by a variety of different names, such as ‘Ultra-Gangetic India’ or ‘the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries’. Many of those who did write …

WPS 12 Completing the Circle: Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia Read More »

Pre-European Asian gunpowder technology has received insufficient attention and the transfers of firearms from Ming China to Dai Viet (modern northern Vietnam) and their implications are a case in point. On the one hand, this paper demonstrates how the Vietnamese acquired gunpowder technology from the Ming from the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries. It …

WPS 11 Chinese Military Technology and Dai Viet: c. 1390-1497 Read More »

Since the 1970s, Singapore and Malaysia have witnessed a revival of interest in what is termed peranakan, baba or Straits Chinese culture and society. Definitions of what these terms mean and what specific ‘identities’ they refer to, however, continue to be contested. The aim of this essay is to address and throw new light on …

WPS 10 Transcultural Diaspora: The Straits Chinese in Singapore, 1819-1918 Read More »

This paper investigates how a regional, ethnic-oriented party, the Dayak Unity Party (commonly abbreviated PD), grew out of the logic of colonial rule.  The Dutch of had forged a “Dayak” identity out of a diverse, autochthonous, non-Islamic population to be juxtaposed against Islamic “Malays.” Specifically, however, the Catholic Church was the institution through which the …

WPS 09 “Primitive” Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Dayak Unity Party in West Kalimantan, Indonesia Read More »

The article traces an historical relationship between modern architecture (particularly housing) and the condition of emergency. It argues for considering de-housing and re-housing as part of a history of mobilization, which taken in its broadest meaning – to render mobile – was among the most common state-citizen interactions of the twentieth century. Beginning with positions …

WPS 08 Toward a Spatial History of Emergency: Notes from Singapore Read More »

This is a paper about the detention of asylum seekers in Australia. It looks at the detention process as a means of creating alienness and strangeness, to be effectively concealed and yet on hand to be paraded when and if necessary. The paper’s central focus will be detention as spectacle. The paper looks at the political theatrics …

WPS 07 The Spectacle of Detention: Theatre, Poetry and Imagery in the Contest over Identity, Security and Responsibility in Contemporary Australia Read More »