• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.7-47
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• 2020

This article is a sub-section of a comparative analysis of depictions of violence in Jakarta's Museum of the Indonesian Communist Party's Treachery, Ho Chi Minh City's War Remnants Museum, and Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In comparing these public history sites, I analyze how memories of mass violence were central to state formation in both Suharto's anti-Communist New Order (1966-1998), the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (1976-present), and Cambodia since the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea (1979-present). While this comparison points out specific distinctions about the role of the military, the nature of revolution, and conceptions of gender, it argues for a central similarity in the use of a mythology of victimization in building these post-conflict nation-states. This article focuses on my gendered analysis of the use of images of women and children in each museum. Depending on context and political purpose, these museums cast women as tragic victim, revolutionary heroine, or threat to the social order. My analysis of gender places stereotypical images of violence against women (the trope of women and children as the ultimate victims) in conversation with dark fantasies of women as perpetrators of savage violence and heroic images of women liberated by participation in violence.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.135-164
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• 2021

In Myanmar studies, despite research on the categorization of ethnic nationalities are fairly much, research on the categorization of Myanmar people (ethnic Myanmar) is rarely exposed. People settled down in Central Myanmar had been categorized by regionalism into two groups as Anyatha (Upper Lander) and Auktha (Lower lander). It can be determined that the regionalism of Myanmar people existed and still exists. Previous scholarship in the colonial history of Myanmar has primarily referred to the documents recorded by the colonial officers and historical texts composed by the British authorities and scholars. The Catalogue of the Hluttaw Records is one of the rarest documents recorded in the Myanmar language on the affairs in the borderline drawn by the British after the Second Anglo-Myanmar War (1852-1853). Scrutinizing the Catalogue of the Hluttaw Records, it has been found that the text sheds light on the division of Central Myanmar into two regions in colonial Burma, later known as Lower Myanmar and Myanmar kingdom. These areas were known as Upper Myanmar between 1853 and 1885, and the categorization of the Myanmar king's subject, known as Anyatha (Upper Lander) and British colony citizen later known as Auktha (Lower Lander). This article traces back the relation of introducing the colonial boundary system and the division of Central Myanmar into two regions that allowed the emergence of regionalism among Myanmar people.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.81-118
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• 2020

Despite its centrality at a pivotal crossroads of both land and sea of East-West trade, communications and travel, the region now known as Southeast Asia provides very few scholarly works situating or featuring it in an international context. Because of this paucity, there is immense scope for exploration. But prior to further explorations, justification is needed to establish that Southeast Asia, as a region, is a subject of interest, relevance, and significance in a global context. Southeast Asia was home to several empires whose reach transcended the region and beyond. Southeast Asia in, and as part of international history as an area of study is therefore justifiable. Moreover, other factors come into play, viz. geography, resources, migration, diffusion of ideas and beliefs from without and accommodation from within, shared experience of imperialism and colonialism, decolonization, and the Cold War, and the collective fate under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), that further bolster its rationalization as a component of international history. Explorations, on the other hand, examine issues and obstacles that contribute to the paucity of works on Southeast Asia in international history. Furthermore, in contextualizing Southeast Asia in international history, there might appear challenges that need to be identified, confronted, and resolved.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.141-155
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• 2020

How might historians secure for the river a larger berth in the recent macro-historical turn? This question cannot find a greater niche than in the emerging critique of the existing spatial configuration of regionalism in mainland Southeastern Asia. The Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze rivers spread out like a necklace around Yunnan and cut across parts of the territories that are known as South, Southeast and East Asia. Each of these rivers has a different topography and fluvial itinerary, giving rise to different political, economic and cultural trajectories. Yet these rivers together form a connected "water-world". These rivers engendered conversations between multi-agentive mobility and large-scale place-making and were at the heart of inter-Asian engagements and integration until the formal end of the European empires. Being both a subject and a sponsor of transregional crossings, the paper argues, these rivers point to the need for a new historical approach that registers the connections between parts of the Southeast Asian massif through to the expansive plain land and the vast coastal rim of the Bay of Bengal and the China Seas. A connection that could be framed through the concept of Holon.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.161-189
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• 2022

Nguyễn Nhật Ánh and Yoshimoto Banana are authors from two different literary movements, cultures, and countries. Their works are all best-sellers and have received many prestigious awards. Comparing their works from the perspective of shoujo manga, we can see that there are many similarities between them. Regarding the concept of composition, they all want to create works that are accessible to the majority of the public. Therefore, they choose topics which are close and attractive to mass readers as well as simple style, characters, literary devices, artistic space and time that are famous in shoujo - a popular art form of Japan. However, the ideological content in the works of both is not explicit and simple, but expresses the eternal feelings and values of humanity such as love for people, love for the homeland, country, reflecting the depths of both the conscious and the subconscious as well as profound aesthetic and philosophical values, profound aesthetic and philosophical values. Their works present the trend of interference between popular culture and elite literature. We can draw lessons for young writers, cultural managers and a wide audience from the success of these two writers.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.157-175
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• 2020

This paper presents the work of Southeast Asian scholar Ramon Guillermo. Using sophisticated computer-aided methods, Guillermo approaches a range of topics in the wide fields of social sciences and the humanities. A creative writer as well as an activist, Guillermo grounds his studies in nationalism and Marxism. Particularly interested in Indonesian and Philippine society and culture, Guillermo engages with the writings of labor leaders Tan Malaka and Lope K. Santos, translations of Marx's Capital into Bahasa and Filipino, and studies as well the discursive and historical connections between the Communist Parties of both countries. The paper aims to introduce the innovations of Guillermo's studies, particularly in the fields of cultural studies and translation studies. The type of cultural studies Guillermo practices is empirical, taking inspiration from innovations done in the digital humanities. Guillermo is most opposed to trendy, fashion-seeking approaches that are not grounded on history. He reserves particular ire for "hip" postcolonialism, and instead praises studies that are founded on politics and materialism. In translation studies, Guillermo goes beyond the mere cataloguing of mistakes. For him, it is the mistakes and "perversities" of a translation that is interesting and illuminating. Guillermo himself is a translator, and the paper ends with a brief discussion of his production in this field.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.7-33
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• 2021

With a view to contributing to the epistemological and methodological debates in Southeast Asian Studies, the aim of this paper is to examine critically the epistemic concepts and approaches in the social sciences and then to seek an epistemic reflexivity and its potential methodological applications to Southeast Asian Studies. Although the field of social sciences has attempted to search for a means of tackling the ontological and epistemological dilemmas in its major paradigms, Southeast Asian Studies still demands a more 'actor-centered' epistemic account of reflexive interaction between actors and social structures. Bearing in mind the need for a more 'actor-centered' epistemic approach, this paper continues to discuss the 'epistemic reflexivity' in the social sciences and its potential applications to Southeast Asian Studies. In this paper, I will consider 'epistemic reflexivity' as an alternative methodological orientation. It emerges as interlinked with the ontological standpoint of what is called 'reflexive approaches' and its application to the detailed 'reflexive methodology' which I am proposing in this paper. In doing so, this paper discusses the autobiographical experiences of the author arising from his ethnographic field research in North Sulawesi, Indonesia and their implication for a reflexive methodology in Southeast Asian Studies. In conclusion, the paper argues that we need a 'more actor-centered' epistemic framework to compensate for the epistemological and methodological dilemmas in the social sciences and the alternative framework will equip Southeast Asian Studies with a reflexive methodology relevant to the life-dynamics of the social world in the process of developing its inquiries, methodological technics, analysis, and validation.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.133-160
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• 2022

This paper examines narratives of women's marginal position in Bao Ninh's Short Stories and Svetlana Alexievich's Unwomanly Face of War from a feminist narratological approach. In analyzing voices of marginalized women, direct and indirect descriptions of women's beauty and pain, and private-public narratives of women's love stories, this paper aims to identify presentations of women's real authority in the text written by a male author, Bao Ninh, and in the one by a female author. The paper argues that juxtaposing these texts reveals an overturn of the traditional conception of sexual and gender differences. Specifically, distinguishing between male/female discourse does not show powerful /nonpowerful language, but recognizes the real authority of each type of discourse based on sexual differences. The writing also illustrates that masculine language becomes powerless and deficient in the women's world; meanwhile, in writing about herself, woman establishes a type of a powerful feminine discourse, which blends both emotional, enthusiastic, and gossipy characteristics of female language and direct, rational, and strong ones of male language. Thus, the feminists' radical segregation on male/female discourses to overturn masculine authority and create a language for women at par with men has been clearly shifted when comparing the two writers' texts based on the juxtapositional model of the comparative literature.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.9-29
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• 2022

Postcolonial critics have criticized Comparative Literature for exclusively studying literatures from the non-Western world through Western lenses. In other words, postcolonial criticism asserts that theorists and practitioners of comparative literature have traced the "assistance" of the classic "comparison and contrast" approach to an imperialist discourse, which sustains the superiority of Western cultures and economies. As a countermeasure to reading through the comparative lens, literary theories have offered a "juxtapositional model of comparison" that connects texts across cultures, places, and times. This paper examines practices of Comparative Literature in Vietnam, revealing how the engagement with decolonizing processes leads to a knowledge production that is paradoxically colonial. The paper also analyses implementations of this model in reading select Vietnamese works and highlights how conventional comparisons, largely based on historical influences and reception, maintain the colonial mapping of World Literature, centralizing Western, and more particularly, English Literature and in the process marginalizing the others. Therefore, the practice of juxtaposing Vietnamese literary works with canonical works of the World Literature will provoke dialogues and raise awareness of hitherto marginalized works to an international readership. In this process, the paper considers the contemporary interest of Comparative Literature practice in trans- national, trans-regional, trans-historical, and trans-cultural perspectives.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.135-159
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• 2021

Thơ mới (Vietnamese New Poetry, 1932-1945) is a literary movement in colonial Vietnam that is broadly considered to have marked the modernization of Vietnamese literature. This paper examines depictions about natural disasters, ecological wounds, and about relationships between humans and nature in New Poetry, asking how those descriptions reflect social and political issues in colonial Vietnam. The paper argues that ecocriticism, developed in Western academy, brought to the New Poetry Movement new meanings, associated with a material world. That is the specific reality of colonial Vietnam in the early twentieth century, when the colonial modernization resulted in natural and social collapses in the area. This approach is especially significant, given that New Poetry is largely seen as the embodiment of the expansion of Western romanticism by Vietnamese scholars. Moreover, in examining Thơ mới (Vietnam) from perspective of ecocriticism, this paper extends the ecocritical approach to non-Western literatures. Specifically, although ecocriticism developed in the West, particularly in United States and England, it has become an effective approach to non-Western literatures, particularly since the early twentieth first century. In this context, Asian literatures, particularly Southeast Asian literatures, potentially offer ecocriticism new meanings, many of which are associated with local social and political conditions and histories.