This issue presents six research articles and a special Forum section, which features a conversation about the position of women as both subjects and contributors to understandings of modernity in Southeast Asia. Based on a conference roundtable at the Association for Asian Studies (Boston, 2023), the text version of that discussion is structured around questions raised by Professor Barbara Watson Andaya (chair of the roundtable), followed by individual responses from leading scholars in the field of gender/Southeast Asia. We hope that this Forum space will help provide a platform to feature the many rich roundtable discussions on Southeast Asian Studies that appear in international conferences around the world.
Our issue begins with Simon Rowedder's article, which examines the affective dimensions of infrastructural development in his study of small-scale cross-border traders in Northern Laos. While conventional studies of Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Southeast Asia tend to foreground China's dominance in its interaction with regional nations, Rowedder's research scales down to investigate how local communities in the Laos province of Luang Namtha encounter, experience, and re-imagine the presence of Chinese capital and infrastructure in their daily lives. In doing so, Rowedder reframes conventional, trans-regional approaches by considering how borderland actors actively contribute to both the BRI and ongoing domestic processes of national and regional integration in Laos. By theorising large-scale Chinese development through the perspectives and practices of ‘smallness’ over time and space, Rowedder argues that small-scale traders in Northern Laos have been continuously active in producing a foundational borderland infrastructure upon which these larger transnational connections have been based.
Vatthana Pholsena's study asks how the Cold War is remembered in northeastern Thailand through the digital practices of communities living in Nakhon Phanon, a contested province (and provincial capital), that was historically a hotbed for communists and a centre for counter-insurgency operations. The article contends that the legacies of violence and difference in provincial locales continue to influence how memorialisation projects are produced and contested online. Her research examines the way three communities — ex-communist veterans, Thai-Chinese, and Thai-Vietnamese — memorialise the town/area and the role that Facebook plays in the promotion of those pasts. By analysing participatory memory practices expressed online and interviewing the administrators of these digital platforms, Pholsena demonstrates how the presence and absence of online content amongst Nakhon Phanon netizens reveal ongoing provincial anxieties and tensions over how that era and the connection to Communism is remembered.
Ngyuyen Thi Hanh and Ngyuen Thi Trang draw our attention to the experiences of the Lính thợ — the worker-soldiers of Tonkin and Northern Annam — who were mobilised and transported to France between 1939 and 1950. Situated within the broader histories of international, colonial, and wartime labour, this article highlights how French labour policies affected the worldviews and self-perceptions of the Lính thợ, who lived in France during the Second World War or were sent back to French Indochina. Where earlier studies explore the experiences of Vietnamese labourers in France more generally, this study looks at how French labour policy exacerbated internal divisions within the Lính thợ community, contributed to their marginalisation within French society, and galvanised them to seek entitlements from the French State.
Lin Hongxuan's contribution examines the influence of socialism on Islamic political thought in Indonesia through the writings of two leading figures of political Islam in the 1950s. The study explores how Muslim intellectuals associated with the dominant Islamic political party of the 1950s (Masjumi) engaged socialist ideas through the published works of two modernists, Zainal Abidin Ahmad and Isa Anshary. While at different ends of the political spectrum, Lin's study suggests that the two modernists converged on shared Marxist ideas of colonialism, trans-national solidarity, and resistance to the influence of global capitalism. The article argues that nationalist thinkers in the 1950s were concerned with socio-economic justice and compassion and attempted to figure out what Indonesian socialism might look like through the lens of Islamic values.
Liam Hoo compares state and public reactions to the 1957 Asian Flu pandemic in 1957 Singapore. Reconstructing a social history of the 1957 Asian Flu, Hoo reconstructs the outbreak of the flu in Singapore, the colonial government's response, and the backlash from the public. The article compares official responses to the epidemic with a variety of community reactions to the epidemic. It argues that Singapore's social response to the Asian Flu of 1957 bifurcated owing to different perceptions of public health.
Huifen Shen's article makes an important contribution to the field of overseas Chinese migration in Southeast Asia through a close study of remittance letters sent between the Philippines and Hong Kong between 1903 and 1916. In broad strokes, the article provides an inter-Asian perspective on how modernisation, commercial expansion and nationalism in early twentieth-century China appeared to overseas Chinese communities living in Southeast Asia. Folded into these correspondences are personal, intimate, and gendered perspectives of everyday concerns between husbands and wives (and extended family members) who would reference ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ differently according to circumstances. Shen's analysis reveals the emotional and negotiated relationships of power that emerged out of this migratory experience. In doing so, the article explores the experience of separation and connection, of distance and nearness, and of affiliation and gender through this close study of family and business.
Our research articles are followed by the Forum discussion and our book review section. We are grateful to the authors, book reviewers, and referees who continue to make the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies the preferred platform for exciting new research in Southeast Asian Studies.
