The Hoàng Lê nhât thông chí is an indispensable text for the study of late eighteenth-century Vietnamese history and especially the Tây So'n uprising. Its influence on subsequent historiography, however, has often been overlooked. This article examines the text, its content and genre, and demonstrates its historiographical impact on both nineteenth-and twentieth-century histories of the Tây So'n period.

This article examines the emergence of twentieth-century technological development policies in the Netherlands East Indies from broader welfare policies formulated in the nineteenth century. Identity became particularly important in policymaking as officials disputed whether differences between Javanese and European culture could explain why the Javanese did not flourish under colonial rule, and whether encouraging Javanese to become more like Europeans would solve ‘Native’ welfare problems. Technical experts, whose development projects would increasingly define what a ‘developed’ Native would be, became crucially important players in debates about ‘Europeanizing’ the indigenous people.

Since German missionaries arrived in the Batak Lands in the early 1860s, the Toba Batak Protestant Church has struggled with its relationship to the indigenous cosmology and belief system known as adat. Using the performance of ceremonial music and dance as a case study, this article explores the impact of continuing local respect for adat on the development of Church policy over 140 years.

In Malaysia, the influence of the hegemonic or ‘authority-defined’ discourse on nation appears so pervasive that it obscures the fact that ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’ identities are in fact highly contested concepts or categories. There is a need, therefore, to examine alternative constructions of ethnic and national identity where dominant notions are challenged, reconstituted and problematized. In keeping with recent developments in critical and literary theory, this article examines selected works of a leading Malaysian novelist, K. S. Maniam, to argue that it is his commitment to the cultural politics of diaspora that problematizes state constructions of a coherent or homogeneous Malaysian identity.

This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Thowok, and the resonances between dance and life. An Indonesian of Chinese descent and a female impersonator whose comic dances combine different regional styles, Didik upsets notions of ethnic and gender stereotypes and identities, the notion of identity itself.

This article examines the cinematic representation of identity through an analysis of the well-known Philippine film, Badjao. Produced in the late 1950s, Badjao successfully commercialized the idea and expression of conflict between the Tausug and Badjao ethnic groups. The study focuses on how the enactment and enunciation of identity through difference presented itself in cinema and how such representations, imbued with stereotypical cultural and religious codes, were re-formulations within nationalist discourses in the Philippines.