This article considers heritage-making associated with Moluccans who, in 1951, were forced out of political necessity to migrate from what is present-day Indonesia to the Netherlands. Specifically, it examines how this story of movement has been represented at Barak 1B, a museum that marks the presence of the minority group within the Dutch nation. Following a brief history of the community, the article considers the genesis of the museum before outlining myriad strategies adopted within it to raise awareness about the Moluccan migrants, and insert them into the fold of national heritage-making in the Netherlands. It then considers public opinions about the museum to demonstrate how, despite appreciation for the gesture, the museum has also received criticisms revealing old wounds that have not healed, and contrasting ideas about how the community's heritage should be represented. Additionally, the article exposes the ambivalence felt by the community in terms of maintaining its ethnic identity and yet also ‘fitting in’ as Dutch, exposing tensions between the Moluccans and their hosts, as well as among the Moluccans themselves. It ends with implications for how heritage in Southeast Asia—both the region and its diasporas—need to be studied.

The article discusses the representation of Hồ Chí Minh in modern Vietnamese cinema from 1990 to the present. The first feature film on Hồ Chí Minh's life was produced only in 1990, 31 years after his death. Since then, 6 more films have appeared. I explore the reasons why there were no feature films about Hồ Chí Minh before 1990 and why they eventually began to appear. I address the filmmakers’ attempts to reintroduce Hồ Chí Minh, especially to younger generations who know of him only through propaganda depicting him as a celibate paragon of virtue and through viewing his embalmed body in the Mausoleum he had objected to. I argue that these cinematographic projects to promote Hồ Chí Minh to younger Vietnamese have done very little to develop, or even maintain, his personal cult, a cult that the state endeavours to exploit to (re)establish its connection to the people, to overcome a prolonged crisis of legitimacy, and to garner popular support for the continuing leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The market economy and openness to the world have inevitably undermined the Hồ Chí Minh cult and ideological constructs supporting it.

Swidden cultivation has long been seen as incompatible with state goals for development, modernisation and environmental protection in Vietnam. This article provides a history of anti-swidden programmes since the French colonial period: how targets were selected, how different justifications were used, how interventions were implemented, and what the impacts were. Shifts occurred over time in targets, tools, and techniques, due to leeway available to local officials and resistance of target populations, but which also prolonged overall anti-swidden campaigns by providing opportunities for continual reinvention. Shifting justifications have allowed for new funding and approaches over time, while remaining rooted in misunderstandings and cultural chauvinism.

There have been some changes to Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, a popular ethnographic theme park built nearly five decades ago during President Suharto's New Order era to present a utopian version of ‘Unity in Diversity’ (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika), Indonesia's state motto. This article discusses the changes and continuities manifested in the present-day slightly expanded Taman Mini. Unlike earlier scholarship focusing on sociopolitical and symbolic aspects of the theme park, this article argues that Taman Mini's mainly domestic visitors understand and interact with its walk-in models of traditional architecture and ‘highlights’ of Indonesian culture and history in ways that often differ from the official script which presents cultural diversity through sanitised ethnographic displays. Moving beyond its official, touristic and commercial intentions and design, Taman Mini has become a lively place for everyday cultural production, engagement and negotiation for its many Indonesian visitors.

This article offers a new perspective on the reception of Marxism in Indonesia by examining the first Malay translations of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1923 and 1925. These translations, made from Dutch and German source texts, ‘domesticated’ the Manifesto by exchanging certain European terms for vernacular ones with greater resonance in the Indonesian context. They also introduced a wider Indonesian audience to Marxist class concepts, which offered a new international way of conceptualising political resistance, and terms from European philosophy and history. In the process, they broke down the barriers built up by Dutch colonial authorities to keep radical European political texts away from vernacular languages. After the failed communist uprisings of 1926–27, the increasingly intense colonial policing regime stifled further dissemination of the Manifesto, but translations of Marx and Engels’ text received a new lease of life during the Indonesian Revolution (1945–49) and in the postwar decades. The Communist Manifesto was suppressed once more under the anti-communist New Order regime which came to power in 1966 and reconstructed the barrier between radical European political thought and the Indonesian language that had been erected by the Dutch.

The history of wildlife conservation in Cambodia in the twentieth century reveals the tensions that existed between the Khmer kingdom and international nature conservation networks, colonial or global. Wildlife conservation in Cambodia was not a priority for the French colonial administration. It only regulated hunting. While the global conservation movement was expanding via international conferences, local French administrators managed to obstruct the implementation of a conservation policy. After the Second World War, Western scientists and activists sought to establish reserves, particularly to protect a new species of wild cattle, the kouprey. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), through the notable efforts of Harold Coolidge, succeeded in convincing Prince Sihanouk to adopt such a policy in the 1960s. However, although 12 per cent of the kingdom's land was protected, funding and means for conservation remained largely inadequate. The war put an end to all conservation programmes. The IUCN renewed its efforts in the 1980s successfully establishing a network of protected areas in Cambodia in 1993. The various twentieth-century Cambodian wildlife conservation policies, which all imposed external models, often without prior adequate field studies or involvement of local populations, have failed to prevent emblematic species from disappearing.

This article is a re-examination of Chinese student activism in Singapore through the lens of cultural performance, which has yet to garner due attention. Tracing the ebb and flow of Chinese school concerts in the politically volatile atmosphere of Cold War era Singapore and Malaya complicates current understanding about student activism in the city state. Whereas the official narratives by the British colonial administration and later, the PAP, often cast Chinese student activism as part of a communist insurgency, this article argues that school concerts—comprising folk dances, songs, choirs and theatre—were an alternative space for Chinese youth to articulate their visions of building an independent socialist state and an integrated multiracial Malayan nation. Unlike the student activism expressed through mass strikes, these school concerts enable one to see how the Chinese students displayed sophisticated ways of discipline, organisation skills, and creative energy through the performing arts in 1950s and 1960s Singapore.

In 1954, a new Philippine trade periodical published its first issue, one of many to follow. The Lumberman, as well as providing a wealth of detail about the early postwar logging and lumber industry in the Philippines, also records a sustained attempt to imbue readers with a progressive forestry ethos capable of combating entrenched notions of the forests as wastelands and trees as a hindrance to civilisation. It would be easy to dismiss this project as naive, and the magazine itself provides a foreshadowing of the wholesale destruction of forests during the 1960s and 1970s, but for those caught up in the events of the 1950s the future was not so certain. The possibility of a capital-intensive industry using the forests of the country in a sustainable manner was not to be ruled out. Although in the end the social forces interested in this project were not strong enough to prevail, this should not stop our recognition that attempts were made to advocate a different path. This study of The Lumberman acknowledges this point.

This article documents a significant and previously unknown episode in the history of Philippine labor, the explosive Manila Port Strike of the arrastre service workers—stevedores and longshoremen—in 1963. The strike was among the largest, costliest and most politically charged labor struggles in the nation's history and yet not only has no account of it been written, it has found no mention in over a half-century of historiography. Using confidential US State Department memoranda, contemporary newspaper accounts, Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) publications, and material published by the Lapiang Manggagawa (LM), I reconstruct the history of the strike. This article examines how an event of this magnitude, while still part of living memory, could disappear from the historical record. The case of the 1963 Port Strike highlights the need to recover the histories of the oppressed by reading not only the official archives, but also the narratives of the workers’ own organisations, against the grain.

Philippine historiography has long ignored the significant but complex role played by the people at the margins of society during the Japanese Occupation, except for some rural movements such as the Hukbalahap in central Luzon. During the Second World War, besides the coercion and violence perpetrated or orchestrated by the Japanese occupying forces from 1942, the people of Leyte experienced many kinds and levels of violence, including among local factions. At the onset of the invasion and from late 1944, Leyte was also the site of major naval and land battles between the returning American forces and the Japanese army, each side seeking to incorporate locals in their campaigns. This essay traces violent episodes involving and among members of the local elite and masses alike in Leyte, during and in the aftermath of the Japanese Occupation and the return of Americans up to Philippine Independence, to show how such violence was not only unleashed by war, but also had deep and complicated roots in colonial history, local politics and rural poverty.

This article examines the role played by commercial advertising in promoting images of city reconstruction and architectural modernity within Manila in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. It concentrates on the leading English-language daily, the Manila Times, which, from early 1946, began publishing advertisements that featured dramatic images of a future city of skyscrapers and other buildings rising out of the ruins of war. Advertisers called out to readers to contribute to the process of economic recovery by purchasing newly arrived shipments of goods and equipment and to support their efforts to drive property investment and the reconstruction of the city. By 1947 publicity was extending into home construction and advertisements incorporated illustrations of modernist houses as a means of promoting imported building products from the United States as well as locally manufactured materials. The article examines these advertisements for what they reveal about the stimulation of public interest in urban and architectural modernity within the Philippines in the early postwar years.

In this article, I argue that Malaysia joined the South China Sea dispute during the 1970s as a reaction to the World Oil Crisis instead of asserting historical claims as in the cases of Vietnam and China. Malaysia expanded its maritime jurisdiction to include several highly disputed maritime features at the height of the oil crisis. The crisis was initiated by an oil embargo imposed by the Arab states, which imposed domestic inflationary pressures on Malaysia's economy. These two factors, external and domestic, resulted in Malaysia's bolstering of its offshore hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation culminating in the expansion of its maritime jurisdiction. In particular, Malaysia expanded its maritime jurisdiction in 1976 and 1979, which coincidentally corresponded with the aftermath of major oil price hikes that occurred in October 1975 and December 1978. Compared to China, Vietnam, and the Philippines, all of whom issued their maritime claims on the South China Sea based on historical or new discoveries, Malaysia's expansion was a mere reaction towards the oil crisis rather than a deliberate move.