Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects
ISBN: 9780295804255
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Washington Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Southeast Asia -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- United States; Southeast Asia -- Study and teaching (Higher);

The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation.



Contributions from the perspectives of history, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and libraries pose questions ranging from how a concern with postcolonial and feminist questions of identity might reorient the field to how anthropological work on civil society and Islam in Southeast Asia provides an opportunity for comparative political theorists to develop more sophisticated analytic approaches. A vision common to all the contributors is the potential of area studies to produce knowledge outside a global academic framework that presumes the privilege and even hegemony of Euro-American academic trends and scholars.


Laurie J. Sears is professor of history at the University of Washington. The other contributors are Carlo Bonura, George Dutton, Judith A. N. Henchy, Ariel Heryanto, and Celia Lowe.

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