New Terrains in Southeast Asian History.

419 Pages·2.022 MB·English

by  Abu Talib Ahmad, Tan Liok Ee (editor)

New Terrains in Southeast Asian History
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New Terrains in
Southeast Asian History
Edited by
Abu Talib Ahmad and
Tan Liok Ee
O h i o U n i v e r s i t y
R e s e a r c h i n I n t e r n a t i o n a l S t u d i e s
Southeast Asia Series No. 107
Ohio University Press
Athens
Singapore University Press
National University of Singapore
© 2003 by the Center for International Studies
Ohio University
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
First published in 2003 by Singapore University Press Pte Ltd.
Yusof Ishak House,
31 Lower Kent Ridge Rd,
National University of Singapore
Singapore 11 9078
SUP ISBN 9971-69-269-4
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
The books in the Ohio University Research in International Studies Series
are printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New terrains in Southeast Asian history / edited by Abu Talib Ahmad and
Tan Liok Ee.
p. cm. —(Ohio University research in international studies.
Southeast Asia series ; no. 107)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-89680-228-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Asia, Southeastern—Historiography. I. Abu Talib Ahmad.
II. Tan, Liok Ee. III. Research in international studies.
Southeast Asia series ; no. 107.
DS524.4 .N48 2003
959'.007'2059—dc21
2002029328
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction
Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee ix
Part One: Seeking New Perspectives and Strategies
Chapter 1. Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian
Historians and Postnational Histories
in Southeast Asia
Thongchai Winichakul 3
Chapter 2. Changing Conceptions of Space in
History Writing: A Selective Mapping of Writings
on Singapore
Brenda S. A. Yeoh 30
Chapter 3. Quantifying the Economic and
Social History of Southeast Asia: A Quest for
New Evidence and Methods
M. R. Fernando 56
Chapter 4. Southeast Asian History,
Literary Theory, and Chaos
Yong Mun Cheong 82
Chapter 5. Country Histories and the Writing of
Southeast Asian History
Paul H. Kratoska 104
Part Two: Constructing and Deconstructing the National Past
Chapter 6. Myanmar Historiography since 1945
Ni Ni Myint 123
Chapter 7. Our Island Story: Economic Development
and the National Narrative in Singapore
C. J. W.-L. Wee 141
Chapter 8. History through the Eyes of the Malays:
Changing Perspectives of Malaysia’s Past
Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail and Badriyah Haji Salleh 168
Chapter 9. Dialogue of Two Pasts: “Historical Facts”
in Traditional Thai and Malay Historiography
Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian 199
Chapter 10. The Scripting of Singapore’s National
Heroes: Toying with Pandora’s Box
Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli 219
Part Three: Shifting Boundaries, Moving Interstices
Chapter 11. Writing Malaysia’s Social History
from the Ecclesiastical Records
Abu Talib Ahmad 249
Chapter 12. Toward an Autonomous History of
Seventeenth-Century Phuket
Dhiravat na Pombejra 274
Chapter 13. Continuity and Connectedness:
The Ngee Heng Kongsi of Johore, 1844–1916
P. Lim Pui Huen 301
Chapter 14. Migrants in Contemporary Vietnamese
History: Marginal or Mainstream?
Andrew Hardy 328
Chapter 15. Locating Chinese Women in
Malaysian History
Tan Liok Ee 354
Contributors 385
Index 389
Preface
The articles in this book are drawn from twenty-nine papers pre-
sented at the Conference on Southeast Asian Historiography since
1945, Penang, 30 July to 1 August 1999. Generous ¤nancial assis-
tance from the Japan Foundation Asia Center and the Southeast
Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP) enabled us
to bring twenty-one participants from various parts of Southeast
Asia to make the conference a meaningful regional discourse. We
thank both organizations and in particular Takao Hirota of the
Kuala Lumpur Japan Cultural Center (Japan Foundation) and
Yumiko Himemoto of SEASREP for their assistance. Moral and
¤nancial support from the Center for Advanced Studies, National
University of Singapore, helped to see this publication to fruition.
We are also grateful to all members of the history section, School of
Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, for pitching in to make the
organization of the conference a truly cooperative effort and to our
former colleagues Cheah Boon Kheng and Paul Kratoska for their
suggestions and support. We thank all participants at the confer-
ence, who together made what everyone fondly remembered after-
ward as the Penang Conference such a stimulating, memorable, and
enjoyable experience. Last but not least, we would like to express
our gratitude to Ohio University Press, especially for the support of
Gillian Berchowitz and the dedication of the editor, Nancy Basma-
jian, and her extremely able team.
vii

Introduction
Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee
In his keynote address to the Conference on Southeast Asian His-
toriography since 1945, Thongchai Winichakul challenged scholars
of Southeast Asian history to explore new terrains in the past by re-
locating themselves, or shifting their angles of visions, to new sites.
He suggested in particular that the concepts of interstices and mar-
gins offer rich possibilities for opening up epistemological spaces
where hitherto displaced or suppressed histories might be hidden.
Both interstices and margins, he pointed out, should not be taken in a
purely literal sense to mean physical or geographical locations but
should be understood metaphorically and analytically, as locations
of alternative temporal and conceptual anchorages from which to
make fresh explorations into the past. The feeling that it was time
for Southeast Asian history writing “to move on,” as Thongchai put
it, beyond the clichéd themes and jaded narratives of national his-
tory, in search of different templates and alternative trajectories,
was echoed in many of the other twenty-eight papers presented at
the conference.
Historians of Southeast Asia have met several times in the past, to
compare notes, share ideas, and re¶ect on the state of their ¤eld. The
most established and in¶uential scholars in the ¤eld were invited to
present papers at such conferences. Hence the publications originat-
ing from them have become important milestones, marking the trails
opened by earlier generations of scholars. The ¤rst of such collec-
tions, containing papers from a conference held at the School of Afri-
can and Oriental Studies in London in the mid-1950s, was published
ix
in 1961.1 The volume, Historians of Southeast Asia, was edited by D.
G. E. Hall, whose own voluminous and pathbreaking work on
Southeast Asian history was published in 1955.2 The colonial era was
coming to an end and it was in this context that Hall made his famous
call for the rewriting of the region’s history in its own right, not as an
appendage to the history of China or India, nor of the Portuguese,
Dutch, English, or any other exogenous powers that may have tow-
ered over the region through the ages. Southeast Asian history, said
Hall, “cannot be safely viewed from any other perspective until seen
from its own.”3
In 1979 a second collection, Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia,
originated from a conference at the Australian National University,
which had become an important center for Asian and Southeast Asian
studies.4 The writers in this later volume were clearly in¶uenced by a
decade of debates about Euro-centric and Asia-centric perspectives in
history writing, in particular the seminal arguments of John Smail
and Harry Benda.5 The authors of Perceptions self-consciously ques-
tioned the framework of “modern” and “scienti¤c” historical meth-
ods from which they peered into historical texts, especially when these
texts re¶ected different views of the past that had to be understood
within the “mental architecture” of people writing in different times
and different parts of Southeast Asia. Three years later a third vol-
ume, Moral Order and the Question of Change, appeared in the United
States, where interest in Southeast Asian studies had grown during
the Vietnam War years. Articles in this book remained focused on the
thinking, beliefs, and perceptions of Southeast Asians, which were
identi¤ed and interpreted through close studies of various texts.6
Whether scholars thought in terms of unearthing “stratigraphic” lay-
ers to arrive at the “deep structures” of Southeast Asian history, or
seeking “autonomous” histories, or delineating indigenous “cultural
matrices,” the preoccupation since the 1970s, especially among schol-
ars in the West, has been to ¤nd the “authentic” local agencies, struc-
tures, or forces that moved historical processes within the region.7
In these earlier conferences and publications no more than a hand-
ful of Southeast Asians participated or contributed papers. Similarly,
x Introduction