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Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia

Postcolonial Studies And Anticolonialism

Scholars in the early twenty-first century have returned to the idea of anticolonialism, armed with new perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches. As colonialism continues to challenge scholars, many in the academe have been inspired by suggestions that "knowledge" and "power" are closely connected, which have resulted in studies attempting to show how "knowledge" about Southeast Asia reveals something about the contexts in which it was produced. Invariably, attention has returned to those early colonial official-scholars who first began collecting, cataloguing, inventorying, and labeling what they considered Southeast Asia to be. Following Edward Said's critique of Oriental knowledge production, scholars have demonstrated not only that this construction of Southeast Asian culture by colonial administrators represented European images of the "Orient" but that it also represented an underlying "power" to say what was and what was not "Southeast Asia." Applying these approaches to the study of resistance and protest, it has become clear that the very categories that define resistance, the rebel, the criminal, and anticolonialism itself were produced in particular contexts that reveal as much about the colonizer as they reveal something about the perceptions of anticolonialism. Research directed at prisons, anti-colonial legislation/law, and criminality have become the focus of study in order to demonstrate how colonial administrations defined Southeast Asian anticolonialism to fit, serve, and respond to the needs of counterinsurgency policies and the maintenance of colonial order. Where once anticolonialism shed light on forms of Southeast Asian culture, it is now redirected to the forms of colonial knowledge and counterinsurgency.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Maitrii Aung-Thwin

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