SOUTHEAST ASIA SESSION 66

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Organizer and Chair: Mark V. Emmanuel, National University of Singapore
Discussant: Craig J. Reynolds, Australia National University

Situated between the two World Wars and characterized by the socio-economic dislocations of the Depression, the 1930s in Southeast Asian history is widely regarded as the decade that witnessed the last breath of colonialism with the emergence of new nationalisms, rural/urban violence, and the impending arrival of the Japanese. Since the 1970s, a select few have pursued these broad topics in greater detail by exploring the origins of peasant protest, the roles of new urban reformists, the complexities of regional economic distress, and the influence of new forms of political organization upon local community formation. While seminal to the field, these works further entrenched the shape of the 1930s through themes, categories, and events that privileged the major actors, ideologies, or discourses that were eventually appropriated by the nation. This panel seeks to reconceptualise this long decade by drawing attention to the wide range of “forgotten” narratives, processes, and epistemologies that have remained marginalized by elite, nationalist, or scholarly priorities. Individually, the papers draw from cases situated in British Burma, Malaya, and Singapore to the Dutch East Indies and Siam, highlighting the wide range of internal, local, and gendered narratives of the period. Collectively, the panel engages the issue of the 1930s as a crucial decade in 20th Century Southeast Asian history by asking: (1) how have particular narratives within this period been remembered or excluded by dominant histories; (2) what criteria should frame our periodization of history, and (3) what alternative memories or perspectives emerge from focusing on this decade?

The Forgotten Decade: Malaysia in the 1930s
Mark V. Emmanuel, National University of Singapore
E. H. Carr argued that when a historian presents new evidence or material, other historians must act as "sponsors" and "second" this new work by embracing and citing it in order for it to become a historical fact. A fact is not a historical fact unless it is remarked upon, referenced, and reproduced by historians and scholars other than the originator. The history of academia abounds with instances of scholars whose work constitutes the only effort of its kind in a particular area of study, but which goes on to languish in obscurity over time, unnoticed, unused, and discontinued. Carr’s reflections on historical remembrance are relevant for the history of the 1930s in Malaya – relatively forgotten and unremarked upon in Malaysian historiography. There has been yet no major historical evaluation of the 1930s in Malaysian history. Even major events of the 1930s like the Great Depression have barely figured in the historiography. Where events of the 1930s have been written about like the Decentralisation proposals, the history is pre-occupied with the Chinese narrative. In this paper, I argue that the 1930s should be seen as a critical juncture in Malaysian history because we see the emergence of Malay ideas of nationalism, economics, and development through the medium of the newspapers, novels and magazines that shape post-war Malaysia. This intellectual renaissance within the Malay community provides us with an opportunity to look at the cross-fertilization of ideas from other parts of Asia during this last breath of colonialism in Southeast Asia.

Objectivity, Morality, and Forgetting: The Academic Quest to “Know” Indonesia Today
Jemma Purdey, Monash University,
In response to the colonial scholarship of the 1930s, the Western academy embarked on a quest to “know” and understand the newly decolonized non-West or “developing” world from within the fields of comparative politics and area studies, emphasizing knowledge of languages, cultures, politics, and societies. In the 1950s and 1960s the intellectual quest to know others was articulated as a quest to better know ourselves. In the 1980s and 1990s, the area studies model was forgotten and abandoned. As Francis Fukyama (2006) observed about the American academy, though it can also be said for the West as a whole, “requirements were changed from knowing languages and history to learning quantitative methods”. For Fukuyama the impetus to reverse this trend today is inextricably linked, as it was in the 1950s, to the national interest. For this is “knowledge that would help us better predict the behavior of political actors, friendly and hostile, in the broader world.” What are the implications of a revival of this model, for questions of objectivity and morality in scholarship? What knowledge will be privileged and what will be forgotten? This paper examines these questions through the field of Indonesian studies in the Australian academy. With its high concentration of Indonesia scholars and complex foreign policy relationship with this large neighbor, the implications of a national push to provide knowledge so “we might better know who are our friends and who are our enemies” are very real for scholars working in the academy today.

Forgotten Rebels: Ethnologies of Nostalgia and Peasant Resistance in Colonial Burma (1930-1932)
Maitrii Aung-Thwin, National University of Singapore
The Saya San Rebellion (1930-1932), regarded by scholars as one of Southeast Asia’s quintessential peasant revolts, has been used to illustrate the perseverance of traditional Burmese worldviews in the wake of dislocations that arose as a result of direct rule in British Burma. The series of uprisings that spread throughout the countryside were allegedly inspired by the prophet-king Saya San, who not only promised the resurrection of the Burmese monarchy, but assured his followers a place in his new Buddhist kingdom through his protective tattooing, amulets, and deliberate references to millennial beliefs as the future-Buddha Maitreya. Much of the evidential record pertaining to the historical narrative on Saya San and his followers was originally produced within pseudo-trials under the supervision of a Special Rebellion Tribunal, whose findings and judgments registered these images of the Burmese peasant as ultimately unable to articulate political dissent in terms other than the traditional. This paper explores the manner in which memory was imbedded in the production of this rebellion narrative. In reconstructing the trials of rebels overshadowed by the role of Saya San, this presentation asks how remembering the monarchy was identified as a crucial element in establishing the rebellion’s coherency, how judicial memory managed this rebellion ethnology for the historical archive, how scholarship entrenched memory as a category of Burmese resistance, and how resulting images of Burmese village communities provided an argument in favor of separating British Burma from British India, an often neglected chapter of Burmese history in the 1930s.

Forgotten Spaces: The Singaporean Kitchen
Nicole T. Tarulevicz, Cleveland State University
As a historical focus of study, kitchens have received little scholarly attention within the field of Southeast Asian studies. In many Southeast Asian countries particularly, Singapore, food plays a significant role in defining Singaporean culture, both for Singaporeans and visitors to this island state. In the 1930s, there was an explosion in the number of publications that dealt with the issue of domestic labour and home economics in many Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, publications of this nature were widely distributed and became increasingly de rigueur reading for the young modern Asian woman. However, this heyday of domestic science in the 1930s was fleeting. Today, the kitchen has become a forgotten space in Singapore society. In scholarly studies including architectural studies, the kitchen as a space in which hybrid and diverse food is prepared is strikingly absent. Architectural studies have tended to focus on the monumental, both in the colonial and the contemporary context. With each decade, the space devoted to the kitchen has been reduced in state-designed Housing Development Board (HDB) flats. Similarly, there has been a noticeable marginalization of the kitchen even in design magazines. By examining the domestic imperatives of the 1930s and the evolutions that come after this decade, this paper strives to provide insights into Singapore’s social hierarchies, domestic arrangements, family structures, and changing meanings of food in the transition from colonialism to independence.