Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects

Laurie J. Sears (Editor)

The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation.

Contributions from the perspectives of history, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and libraries pose questions ranging from how a concern with post-colonial and feminist questions of identity might reorient the field to how anthropological work on civil society and Islam in Southeast Asia provides an opportunity for comparative political theorists to develop more sophisticated analytic approaches. A vision common to all the contributors is the potential of area studies to produce knowledge outside a global academic framework that presumes the privilege and even hegemony of Euro-American academic trends and scholars.

Laurie J. SEARS is professor of history at the University of Washington, USA. The other contributors are Carlo Bonura, George Dutton, Judith A. N. Henchy, Ariel Heryanto and Celia Lowe.

[This book is part of the Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies Series.] 

publication year: 2007
296 pages
ISBN: 978-9971-69-366-4  Paperback  US$30.00  S$38.00  

A co-publication with University of Washington Press.
Our edition is available in Asia, Australia and New Zealand.