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.

This article focuses on how political agendas and existing societal circumstances in three Southeast Asian regions impacted the early history of immigrant Hokkiens, one of the most prominent Chinese ethnic groups. The article argues that different Hokkien actions and their outcomes were shaped or highly influenced by the prevailing agenda and political struggles of local rulers and/or colonial powers, resulting in selective adaptive behaviour as ‘challengers’ or ‘cooperators’. There were prominent immigrant Hokkien challengers to the status quo in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippine Islands, but both cooperators with the prevailing status quo and challengers to it were common in Hoi An, Vietnam. By contrast, cooperators were conspicuous in Batavia and in the colonial Dutch East Indies.

In December 2019, Michael Falser, of the University of Heidelberg, a specialist on heritage preservation and the art and architectural history of South and Southeast Asia, published his two-volume study, Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritages, which he had spent almost ten years researching. The volumes cover the history of research of the most famous monument in Cambodia, Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious monument, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1992. The two volumes include more than 1,400 black-and-white and colour illustrations, including historical photographs and the author's own photographs, architectural plans and samples of tourist brochures and media clips about Angkor Wat, which has been represented as a national and international icon for almost 150 years, since the 1860s.

This article examines colonial secularism in Burma through a history of the built environment of Rangoon. The creation of the colonial city in the 1850s as an ordered grid of ethnic neighbourhoods and established religions served as a pedagogy of the secular, teaching its population to internalise religious difference. And yet, against this secular vision in brick and pavement there were exceptional spaces that enacted alternative visions. The Thayettaw monastic complex began as home for the diverse displaced ethnic monasteries of the pre-colonial town, but it soon defied the boundaries of colonial rule. Its practice of Buddhism became a mechanism for mobility, interaction, and interconnection.

This article investigates the gender role attitudes and domestic division of labour of young couples in northern Vietnam. Based on separate interviews with 30 couples living in rural and urban areas, it explores young people's thoughts about the roles of a wife and a husband and how these translate into their allocation of housework. Analysis of the interviews indicates that the perceptions and expectations of young people remain influenced by traditional gender ideology, in that wives are still considered mainly responsible for housework. However, in practice, gender roles are highly flexible and demonstrate significant mutual support. In addition, the similarities or differences between spouses in terms of gender role attitudes contribute to levels of relative satisfaction regarding the current division of labour in households.