Colonialism

While the terms of the colonial encounter were being reconfigured and though scholars were seemingly decolonizing the epistemology of Southeast Asia, others began to question the direction the field had taken and the perspective in which colonialism was being discussed. Smail's "autonomous" history had fundamentally edged the scholarship toward a fresh course of research, but there were still some lingering issues that needed to be resolved. The field's leanings toward supposed indigenous categories as modes of analyses might have fallen a bit short in providing a total picture of colonialism in Southeast Asia by underestimating the impact of colonial influences on society. Scholars had merely swung the pendulum from one end of the spectrum to the other, extending a little too much enthusiasm for the continuities and unchanging nature of Southeast Asian cultural forms.

Following the important arguments in Edward Said's Orientalism, scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler questioned the essential nature of these categories while at the same time challenging the "European versus Southeast Asian" perspective upon which studies of colonialism continued to rest. Although important writers such as Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi had developed their seminal arguments about those who lay between the "colonized" and "colonizer," applying these types of questions to the study of colonial society in Southeast Asia remained in its infancy. With these new callings, the study of "mixed-bloods" in Dutch Indonesia, the "métisse" in French Vietnam, "mestizos" in the Spanish Philippines, and "Eurasians" became an important challenge to the idea that colonial society and its study could be divided into simple binary categories of analysis. These studies also suggested that colonialism in Southeast Asia (and beyond) was much more complex than previously imagined, pointing to a variety of situations and scenarios in which ideas, institutions, and technology were exchanged in different and often complicated ways. Colonialism in Southeast Asia could no longer be viewed as a neat and simple process, the colonial encounter could no longer be approached through binary framings, and it became clear that the categories that had been considered intrinsically "European" or "Southeast Asian" were no longer tenable.

The realization that colonialism was a much more complicated process that occurred at different intensities, at different times, and in different places also inspired scholars to look at other domains in Southeast Asia where such mixing and blurring of ideas might occur. Many scholars had been pondering this idea for some time, outside the contours of colonial studies but within the framework of Asian nationalism. Benedict Anderson's seminal Imagined Communities set the agenda by demonstrating that the nation-state was articulated through cultural forms that enabled peoples to bridge the conceptual gap between kin and citizen. Many of these forms of community bonding were those introduced by colonial authorities, adopted by urban nationalists, and localized by grassroots leaders. These patterns of exchange were shown to have occurred at every level of society, and consequently colonialism's shape became influenced by the concerns and mechanics of nationalism.

Colonialism's relationship to Southeast Asian nationalism developed significantly following the important insights of Anderson. One of his students, Thongchai Winichakul, extended the connections between colonial statecraft and nationalist identity by demonstrating the influence of map-making and the creation of Thai identity in his exceptional work, Siam Mapped. Though his emphasis was on the notion of "Thainess" and its relationship to boundaries, Winichakul's study reinforced the idea that colonial notions of space, measurement, ethnicity, and history were being actively engaged by Southeast Asian elites—even from those who were not formally colonized. Colonial knowledge was not something that was strictly part of the European conceptual world, it was constantly being reshaped, modified, and localized to fit the needs of Southeast Asians, who in many cases used these new ideas to emulate as well as resist European hegemony. Along the same lines, Maurizio Peleggi's Lords of Things demonstrates how the Thai monarchy embraced different forms of European material culture in an effort to redefine itself in the style of European monarchies, changing its public image through colonial ideas of modernization. Studies exploring the nature and origins of Southeast Asian nationalism indirectly contributed to the changing understanding of colonialism by continuing to challenge the terms and situations that characterized that encounter. Writing against the pervasive grain that had kept Southeast Asians locked in their temporal and spatial limbo, scholars began to investigate the ways in which technologies were disseminated and more often appropriated to transform the Southeast Asian conceptual world. Print culture, education, social engineering, and advancements in communication were actively being adopted to fit the needs of new and old elites alike, while at the same time these modes of colonialism were also being used to reify and remake "traditional" forms of Southeast Asian culture.