Colonialism

Scholarship from the late 1990s and early 2000s has made provocative connections between the history of colonialism and the production of knowledge in Southeast Asia. Many of the categories and approaches used to conceptualize the region's contours—its cultures, institutions, languages, ethnicities, and histories—have been shown to be largely conceived, organized, and textualized by colonial administrator-scholars seeking to make legible the vast territories, societies, and peoples that had come under their authority. This legacy has not always been recognized, though active measures were taken by scholars in the 1960s and 1970s hoping to decolonize the epistemology of Southeast Asia by referring to categories and terms thought to be "autonomous" to the region. Although this scholarship produced the bulk of Southeast Asian knowledge, research from the late 1990s and beyond is noticing that some of these studies relied on categories and perspectives that emerged through colonial understandings of Southeast Asia. Turning to indigenous language sources or traditional perspectives was not enough—the evidence for what was considered traditional, indigenous, or autonomous was often based on the documents of officials who wrote into these sources their own agendas, concerns, and priorities.

One such example might be found in Laurie J. Sears's path-breaking study Shadows of Empire, which reconstructs the way in which Dutch views of traditional wayang kulit (shadow-puppet theater) were adopted by scholars and Javanese alike. Not only is the role of the Dutch in the "inventing" of tradition explored, but Sears also charts the way in which the meanings of these cultural symbols were contested by officials, scholars, and performers throughout history. This approach recast the way in which colonialism was being considered: Elements thought to be distinctly Southeast Asian were now being reevaluated as products of colonialism, revealing the unsettled nature of "traditional" culture and revisiting European influence on the epistemological landscape of the region.

The picture of colonialism was that its reach was far more penetrating than once held and that through the study of more benign forms of authority, the actual extent of that influence might be perceived. Leading scholars such as Vicente L. Rafael, author of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, and Rudolf Mrázek, author of Engineers of Happy Land, have revealed how colonial photography, roads, language policy, architecture, electricity, and travel literature reflect the relationship between colonial technology, knowledge, and power. Moreover, Mrázek's work employs an important and provocative approach by suggesting that it is possible to "read" colonial society and its forms like a text. In a sense, his unique "translation" of Dutch buildings, roads, and magazines applies approaches to colonial society that are usually reserved for studying Southeast Asia's deep past. Panivong Norindr's Phantasmatic Indochina addresses the ways in which French colonial ideology can be gleaned from its films, exhibitions, and architecture. More importantly, the studies contained within this work address how the very idea of "Indochine" was a concept that was invented, reified, and articulated to justify political-economic policies on the one hand and how cultural forms contributed to that imagining on the other. Ironically, colonial studies has gone from one end of the spectrum to the other; while early colonial administrators tried hard to textualize the boundaries and contents of their imagined colony, scholars today are disassembling those constructs by relying on the very sources those early officials produced.

Finally, advancement in gender and identity studies has also reworked the manner in which scholars have approached the relationship between colonialism and social policies. Just as the categories of colonizer and colonized were once problematized to reveal those communities lying "in-between," approaching colonialism through gender-inspired scholars to consider how European notions of womanhood transformed sexual relations and expectations of "native" women within colonial communities. These studies have explored the role and symbol of European motherhood in the colony and the manner in which this image affected policy toward the maintenance of white communities. By doing so, they have directly confronted the image of the colony as a site for "unfettered economic and sexual opportunity" through policies that attempted to curb men from racial intermixing and "going native."