Sheila Allan was just 17 years old when Japanese forces invaded Malaya in late 1941. British leaders surrendered at Singapore in 1942, subjecting hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians to Japanese internment for the duration of the war — including Allan. During that time, she became infatuated with the women's camp commandant, Dr Elinor Hopkins, whom she described as a ‘dream mother’. Her love and admiration blurred the lines between familial intimacy and sexual desire. Meanwhile, Allan was categorised as ‘Eurasian’ by both her Japanese captors and other European captives. She longed to be regarded as British and Australian, like her father. Nonetheless, white women condemned Eurasian women as sexually lax and immoral and questioned their right to be interned. As a result, Allan's desires for a white ‘dream mother’ reveal the fraught nature of racial, gender and sexual identities in wartime and under colonialism. These influenced not only her methods and strategies of coping during the war, but her hopes of finding love and intimacy when it was over. Her story reveals how fragile colonial categories and wartime violence fractured the destinies of colonial subjects, while love and devotion could be life-affirming.

This article examines the phenomenon of Cambodian intellectual curiosity about China through the social experiences of Phouk Chhay, a prominent leftist activist-critic and Pol Pot's one-time secretary. Amid Phnom Penh's urban radical culture, Phouk transformed from rural student to Communist guerrilla. He associated with Communists, formed pro-China student associations, and through his networks, went on trips that left lasting impressions. This study draws from issues of the Cambodian-Chinese newspaper Mianhua ribao (Sino-Khmer Daily) and several forced confessions to tell a story of becoming that examines community and network in charting the course of ‘China-curiosity’ as intertwined with Phouk's life trajectory.

China's resistance to Japanese aggression escalated into a full-scale war in 1937. The continuously deteriorating situation stimulated the rise of Chinese nationalism in the diaspora communities worldwide. The Japanese invasion of China, accompanied by the emergence of the National Salvation Movement (NSM) in Southeast Asia, provided the overseas Chinese with a rare opportunity to re-examine their ‘Chineseness’, as well as their relationships with the colonial states and the increasingly self-aware indigenous populations. This research problematises traditional approaches that tend to regard the NSM as primarily driven by Chinese patriotism. Juxtaposing Malaya and Java at the same historical moment, the article argues that the emergence of the NSM was more than just a natural result of the rising Chinese nationalism. Local politics and the shifting political orientations of overseas Chinese communities also profoundly shaped how the NSM played out in different colonial states.

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.

This article deals with the Namsang project in Burma, run in the late 1950s and early 1960s to engage demobilised soldiers in establishing a series of cooperative villages modelled on Israeli settlements with Israeli technical and other assistance. The article explores the Burmese modernisation project in the context of the unification of the country and the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. In its examination of the Namsang project, this article offers a microscopic view of the translation of planning practices to other contexts in general, but also asks some more specific questions, such as how Burmese and Israeli national identity, memory, and history defined the project agenda, what the planners’ ambitions were, and why the project failed.

The artworks 1001st Island — The Most Sustainable Island in Archipelago (2015–16) by Tita Salina and Dewa Murka (2016) by Teja Astawa are compared as a means to provide insight into ways artists have been interrogating recent urban discourse in Indonesian contemporary art. This article engages with the critical vocabulary proposed by urban historian Abidin Kusno, which analyses green discourse in the changing Indonesian urban landscapes of the post-Suharto era, and explores how these two artworks reflect Kusno's analysis. Salina's multi-media installation and Astawa's painting address two land reclamation projects in areas that have faced rapid urbanisation: Jakarta and Bali. The artworks evoke questions about tradition, spirituality, environmental sustainability and socioeconomic inequality. The artworks are formally and contextually analysed before being compared and evaluated in relation to Indonesian urban history and discourse. Both artists reflect Kusno's critical analysis of green discourse in Indonesia. Salina's work shares parallels with the tools applied by the government in Jakarta, as her artistic practice similarly requires communities to participate in its creation. Meanwhile, Astawa's work mostly reflects the narrative of green discourse. This conclusion invites further investigation into the Java-centrism of urban discourse and the varying ways in which green discourse may be taking place across the Indonesian archipelago.

The 2005 launch of a large-scale rubber plantation in Bachiang district, one of several in southern Laos, caused serious discontent among the local villagers whose traditional farming and foraging lands were seized and leased to a rubber company. This and other similar rubber developments based on land concessions in the south have drawn criticism from various quarters, including scholars and nongovernmental organisations. This study highlights how the locals’ views, livelihoods and lifestyles have been changing since the plantation was established, especially since rubber tapping began, and focuses on desires that may have directed their actions. Through an ethnographic approach tracing these changes over time, this study demonstrates that differentiation and diversification within the village have become increasingly apparent owing to both the recent shift to plantation work and other impacts and changes brought about by wider society.

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.

The diversity of national imaginings within the East Timorese resistance movement against the Indonesian Occupation (1975–99) became visible through the country's post-independence politics. Namely, the contradiction between the returnee leaders and those who fought in East Timor over the representation of FRETILIN (the major nationalist movement since 1974) has been an important fault line. This article attempts to understand this discrepancy through a comparison of FRETILIN's campaigns in Tetun and Portuguese and how different audiences interpreted them. The article argues that FRETILIN modified its international rhetoric when it became a popular Tetun language movement to attract Timorese commoners. The Tetun version of FRETILIN provided sources for Timorese national imaginings based on local beliefs, sacred landscapes, and Southeast Asian social relations that deviated from how international audiences understood FRETILIN. This article thus contributes to the literature on Southeast Asian resistance and nationalism by revealing Timorese ideologies of resistance and nationhood.

This article traces the transformation of Huế from an open migrant society to a closed community from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries through an examination of the village documents of Thanh Phước in Thừa Thiên Huế province. In Thanh Phước, the expansion of cultivated land reached its limits around the end of the seventeenth century. Subsequently, continuous population pressure resulted in the emergence of social groups with closed and fixed membership called làng and dòng họ after the eighteenth century. A significant feature of this social development was that the patrilineal kinship favoured by Confucianism was used to protect the vested interests of the earliest inhabitants of the village and their descendants. This indicates that the penetration of Confucianism among the common people and the development and stagnation of agriculture in early modern Vietnam were mutual, complementary phenomena.

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.

These three volumes, along with the forthcoming Volume 2D, the catalogue of metal and metal-related finds, present the results of a thorough, detailed study of the metals recovered during archaeological investigations in 1974 and 1975 at the village of Ban Chiang and three smaller sites in the northern part of northeast Thailand. At a time when little was known of Southeast Asian prehistory, the finding of very elaborately painted earthenware pottery vessels, probably prehistoric, at Ban Chiang stirred the interest not only of archaeologists, but also, unfortunately, from the standpoint of scientific investigation of the past, that of looters, dealers, and collectors of antiquarian art. In order to recover a sample of these vessels in their original depositional context, the Thailand Fine Arts Department and the University of Pennsylvania undertook one of the largest excavations of a prehistoric site carried out in Southeast Asia at the time. What subsequently caused added excitement in the media and the scientific community was the recovery of artefacts of iron that appeared to date to the second millennium BCE and of copper or bronze associated with dates in the fourth millennium BCE, perhaps as early as 3600 BCE, seeming to confirm similar early dates for bronze working from the nearby site of Non Nok Tha. Such early dates suggested the possibility of an independent development of metallurgy in Southeast Asia. Because of the importance of the excavation at Ban Chiang as a milestone in Thai and Southeast Asian archaeology, the site was later placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

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.

Shrimp farming in Southeast Asia is often touted as a globalisation success story. The region emerged as a key area for farmed shrimp production in the 1990s, and it remains a leading producer of shrimp for export to international markets to this day. This achievement has not, however, been without cost. Small-scale shrimp farmers in Southeast Asia have suffered persistent social, economic and environmental dislocations stemming from price pressures imposed by globalisation and neoliberal economic policies in the seafood sector. Community supported fisheries (CSF) represent an alternative marketing model which could potentially support small-scale producers in Southeast Asia whose viability is threatened by the intensification of shrimp production by large corporate interests. This article investigates opportunities for CSF in the region, encourages research that builds social capital in aquaculture communities, and identifies opportunities to link small-scale shrimp farming operations with local markets that seek high quality seafood produced in an environmentally sustainable and socially responsible manner.