Research in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

BitterSweet

Tue, 15 Jan 2008

BitterSweet
The Memoir of a Chinese-Indonesian Family in the Twentieth Century

By Stuart Pearson

Millions of Chinese have left the mainland over the last two centuries in search of new beginnings. The majority went to Southeast Asia, and the single largest destination was the colony of the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. Wherever the Chinese landed they prospered, but in Indonesia, even though some families made fortunes, they never felt they quite belonged.

BitterSweet is the account of one Chinese-Indonesian family whose story stretches over the generations as their fortunes waxed and waned through revolution, riots, war, depression, occupation, and finally emigration to yet another country—Australia.

BitterSweet offers a unique insight into a world rarely seen before. An Sudibjo’s memoir, written from a woman’s perspective, is a valuable resource for anyone studying Indonesian history or the Chinese Diaspora.

An Utari Sudibjo (b. 1912) was a fifth-generation Chinese resident of the Netherlands East Indies. In 1967, after a distinguished career as a senior civil servant in the Dutch colonial and then the Indonesian Education Department, she and her husband emigrated to Australia where they operated a restaurant for the next 30 years. She lives in a nursing home in Sydney, aged 95.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/BitterSweet.
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Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini

Sun, 13 Jan 2008

Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini
Her Sisters’ Letters from Colonial Java

Edited by Joost J. Coté

Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini: Her Sisters’ Letters from Colonial Java presents a unique collection of documents reflecting the lives, attitudes, and politics of four Javanese women in the early twentieth century. Joost J. Coté translates the correspondence between Raden Ajeng Kartini, Indonesia’s first feminist, and her sisters, revealing for the first time her sisters’ contributions in defining and carrying out her ideals. With this collection, Coté aims to situate Kartini’s sisters within the more famous Kartini narrative–and indirectly to situate Kartini herself within a broader narrative.

The letters reveal the emotional lives of these modern women and their concerns for the welfare of their husbands and the success of their children in rapidly changing times. While by no means radical nationalists, and not yet extending their horizons to the possibility of an Indonesian nation, these members of a new middle class nevertheless confidently express their belief in their own national identity.

Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini is essential reading for scholars of Indonesian history, providing documentary evidence of the culture of modern, urban Java in the late colonial era and an insight into the ferment of the Indonesian nationalist movement in which these women and their husbands played representative roles.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Realizing+the+Dream+of+R.+A.+Kartini.
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Being “Dutch” in the Indies

Tue, 01 Jan 2008

Being “Dutch” in the Indies
A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920

By Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben

Being “Dutch” in the Indies portrays Dutch colonial territories in Asia not as mere societies under foreign occupation but rather as a “Creole empire.” In telling the story of the Creole empire, the authors draw on government archives, newspapers, and literary works as well as genealogical studies that follow the fortunes of individual families over several generations. They also critically analyze theories relating to culturally and racially mixed communities. The picture of the Indies they develop shatters conventional understandings of colonial rule in Asia.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Being+%E2%80%9CDutch%E2%80%9D+in+the+Indies.
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Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement

Mon, 01 Oct 2007

Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement
Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power

By Ingrid Jordt

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.

Drawing on more than ten years of extensive fieldwork in Burma, Ingrid Jordt explains how vipassanā meditation has brought about a change of worldview for millions of individuals, enabling them to think and act independently of the totalitarian regime. She addresses human rights as well as the relationship between politics and religion in a country in which neither the government nor the people clearly separates the two. Jordt explains how the movement has been successful in its challenge to the Burmese military dictatorship where democratically inspired resistance movements have failed.

Jordt's unsurpassed access to the centers of political and religious power in Burma becomes the reader's opportunity to witness the political workings of one of the world's most secretive and tyrannically ruled countries. Burma's Mass Lay Meditation Movement is a valuable contribution to Buddhist studies as well as anthropology, religious studies, and political science.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Burma%E2%80%99s+Mass+Lay+Meditation+Movement.
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Southeast Asian Lives

Thu, 15 Feb 2007

Southeast Asian Lives
Personal Narratives and Historical Experience

Edited by Roxana Waterson

As news accounts report almost daily, the social, political, and economic atmosphere of Southeast Asia makes it one of the most dynamic and quickly developing regions of the world. Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience presents extraordinary life stories of ordinary people in a rapidly changing Southeast Asia.

The narratives provide illustration of the richness of life histories by revealing what it was like to live through the wrenching social changes that have accompanied successive political transformations in Southeast Asia, from the period of European colonialism, through the wartime occupation of Southeast Asia by the Japanese, to the emergence of new nation states. By pushing the boundaries of analysis of individual narratives, the authors, all anthropologists, demonstrate what a rich source such accounts can be for an anthropology that seeks to do justice to personal experience.

Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience will be of cross-disciplinary interest and importance to researchers in the fields of literature, history, anthropology, and sociology working on biography, autobiography, personal narratives, and oral history.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Southeast+Asian+Lives.
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The Komedie Stamboel

Wed, 15 Feb 2006

The Komedie Stamboel
Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903

By Matthew Isaac Cohen

Originating in 1891 in the port city of Surabaya, the Komedie Stamboel, or Istanbul-style theater, toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship. The company performed musical versions of the Arabian Nights and European fairy tales and operas such as Sleeping Beauty and Aida, as well as Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories. The actors were primarily Eurasians, the original backers were Chinese, and audiences were made up of all races and classes.

While audiences marveled at spectacles involving white-skinned actors, there were also racial frictions between actors and financiers, sex scandals, fights among actors and patrons, bankruptcies, imprisonments, and a murder.

Matthew Isaac Cohen's evocative social history situates the Komedie Stamboel in the culture of empire and in late nineteenth-century itinerant entertainment. He shows how the theater was used as a symbol of cross-ethnic integration in postcolonial Indonesia and as an emblem of Eurasian cultural accomplishment by Indische Nederlanders. A pioneering study of nineteenth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891-1903 gives a new picture of the region's arts and culture and explores the interplay of currents in global culture, theatrical innovation, and movement in colonial Indonesia.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Komedie+Stamboel.
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Locating Southeast Asia

Sat, 01 Jan 2005

Locating Southeast Asia
Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space

Edited by Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt

Southeast Asia summons images of tropical forests and mountains, islands and seas, and a multitude of languages, cultures, and religions. Yet the area has never formed a unified political vision nor has it developed cultural unity. Academics have defined Southeast Asia over the years as what is left over after subtracting Australia, the South Pacific islands, China and India. More technically, Southeast Asia is defined as consisting of eleven countries: the ten members of ASEAN (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar/Burma, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam), and Timor Lesté.

Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space considers Southeast Asia from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The authors—from Southeast Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States—address climate; perceptions from the seas as seen by fishermen, naval officers, and governments; urbanization and industrialization; improvements in transport and communications; and the world of impoverished small farmers and marginalized minorities. Contributors also discuss borders, monetary networks, transnational flows of people, goods and information, and knowledge in shaping Southeast Asia.

Locating Southeast Asia offers important insights for its residents, for those who study it, and for the wider world.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Locating+Southeast+Asia.
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Power Plays

Sun, 31 Oct 2004

Power Plays
Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java

By Andrew N. Weintraub

Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning twenty years, Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia. Wayang golek has shaped, as well, the technological and commercial conditions of art and performance in a modernizing society.

Using interviews with performers, musical transcriptions, translations of narrative and song texts, and archival materials, author Andrew N. Weintraub analyzes the shifting and flexible nature of a set of performance practices called Padalangan, the art of the puppeteer. He focuses on "superstar" performers and the musical troupes that dominated wayang golek during the New Order political regime of former president Suharto (1966-98) and the ensuing three years of the post-Suharto period. Studies of actual performances illuminate stylistic and formal elements and situate wayang golek as a social process in Sundanese culture and society. Power Plays includes an interactive multimedia CD-ROM of wayang golek.

Power Plays shows how meanings about identity, citizenship, and community are produced through theater, music, language, and discourse. While based in ethnographic theory and methods, this book is at the center of a new synthesis emerging among ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Its cross-disciplinary approach will inspire researchers studying similar struggles over cultural authority and popular representation in culture and the performing arts.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Power+Plays.
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Islam and the State in Indonesia

Fri, 06 Aug 2004

Islam and the State in Indonesia

By Bahtiar Effendy

Since the unraveling of Western colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, Muslim nations have struggled to reconcile Islamic ideas and political movements with the state. In Indonesia, in particular, Islam and the state have long been at an impasse. While the ritual dimension of Islam has been allowed to flourish, political Islam has been defeated by various means.

Islam and the State in Indonesia probes the nature and effects of this mutual suspicion in a country in which 87 percent of the people are Muslims. Author Bahtiar Effendy addresses the problem of the Islam-state relationship in Indonesia in light of the fact that Islam—contrary to stereotypes—is a religion open to many interpretations and expressions by its followers. As Professor Effendy contends, there is no legitimate political reason to place Islam in opposition to the modern political system. Rather, the tension derives from the way Islam is articulated socio-culturally, economically, and politically in Indonesia.

Islam and the State in Indonesia documents the background of this hostile relationship and analyzes the efforts of a new generation of Muslim political thinkers and activists to overcome it. The book also examines the state's recent moves toward accommodating political Islam.

This book is groundbreaking both in its illumination of the past and in its insights into a way out of historic problems. It will be of great interest to students, scholars, journalists, government officials, and others seeking to understand this complex and divisive arena.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Islam+and+the+State+in+Indonesia.
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Tensions of Empire

Tue, 14 Oct 2003

Tensions of Empire
Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and Postcolonial World

Edited by Paul H. Kratoska

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. It also examines Japanese perceptions of Southeast Asia and the lingering ambivalence toward Japanese involvement in Asia and toward the war in particular.

Drawing on extensive multilingual archival research and interviews, Ken'ichi Goto has produced a factually rich and balanced view of this region's historical events of the last century.

Tensions of Empire features detailed discussions of Portuguese Timor in the 1930s and 1940s, the decolonization of Malaya, and twentieth-century Indonesia. This extended inquiry yields a unique view of the complicated network within and beyond the colonial and imperial relationships between a one-time nonwestern colonial power and an entire region.

Of great interest to students of Japan-Southeast Asia relations and to specialists in the modern history of both Southeast Asia and Japan, Professor Goto's Tensions of Empire is a fascinating account of Japan's recent past from the inside.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Tensions+of+Empire.
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