New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

When we think about the way that Southeast Asian rulers governed their kingdoms, we usually think of the relationship between the rulers and the people. But as Katheryn Dyt shows in her new book, The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (University of Hawaii Press, 2025), royal governance in the Kingdom of Vietnam depended on a highly detailed knowledge of the weather and the natural environment. Kings took a deep, personal interest in the weather, even writing poetry in an attempt to influence it. The Vietnamese royal bureaucracy had a ‘Bureau for the Observation of the Sky’ to advise the king on portentous signs and omens which might help him interpret the will of Heaven. This premodern understanding of the natural world was influenced both by classical Chinese learning, as well as by an empirical understanding of Vietnam’s distinct climate and landscape. This highly original book connects Vietnam’s precolonial political history with an understanding of the natural environment seen through the eyes of Vietnamese kings and royal officials.Kathryn Dyt is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the History department at SOAS, University of London.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape (Bristol UP, 2025) explores how political actors draw on memories of violent pasts to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in post-violence Cambodia, Rwanda and Indonesia, the book demonstrates in what way power is derived from how roles are assigned, exploring who is deemed a perpetrator, victim or hero, as well as ambivalences in this memory. In the book, Williams interrogates the ways in which these roles are attributed and ambivalences created in each society’s political discourses, transitional justice processes and cultural heritage. The comparative empirical analysis illustrates the importance of memory for political power and legitimacy today.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Malay world boasts a wealth of diverse cultures. The arrival of Islam in the Malay world during the 12th to 13th centuries permanently transformed the aesthetic landscape, and even European colonisation could not stem this change. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Dr. Dzul Afiq bin Zakaria and Dr. Wahyuni Masyidah Binti Md Isa from the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Malaya about the localisation of Islamic arts in Malaysia. They illuminate the core of Islamic arts, which view art as a reflection of their faith. In Islam, there is no fundamental distinction between spiritual and secular art, enabling the qualities of Islamic architecture and arts to rise above mere aesthetics and utility. Dr. Dzul Afiq bin Zakaria, a distinguished scholar and artist, possesses artwork that can be shared with our audience to elucidate the relationship between culture, philosophy, and the arts within the Malay world. Dr. Wahyuni Masyidah Binti Md Isa’s research employs Motion Capture technology to chart and conserve Islamic art. For example, Senaman Melayu Tua is a therapeutic exercise rooted in Malay culture. This exercise harmoniously integrates with both Malay culture and Islam, yielding comprehensive positive effects on the spiritual aspect by fostering inner peace, patience, and self-awareness. Her research utilises technology to visualize the micro-lines embedded within Senaman Melayu Tua. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Chen is one of the Editors of the highly-ranked Journal of Chinese Political Science. Formerly, she was Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press, 2025), an ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Dr. Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled "Protestant" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Dr. Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), notes that “British India” once spanned all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the border with Thailand, covering South Arabia, South Asia and Burma. Yet between 1937 and 1971, the region split into various different national entities, creating the countries and borders we see today. Sam is a historian, filmmaker, and cofounder of Project Dastaan, a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 partition of India. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shattered Lands. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (Manchester University Press, 2025), historian Matthew Bowser examines British imperialism in late colonial Burma (from roughly 1929 to 1948) to study how imperialists attempted to protect their strategic and economic interests after decolonization: they did so by supporting ethnonationalism. This process resembles the Cold War tactic of “containment,” and the book makes a crucial contribution to the study of modern imperialism by demonstrating the continuity between “containment’s” late- and “neo”-colonial manifestations. For Burma/Myanmar, it also explores the origin of the present-day military junta’s racial regime: it emphasizes the protection of the ethnoreligious majority from ethnic minority insurgency. The Rohingya people are currently suffering a genocide because of this racial regime. As the country endures civil war against the junta, this book highlights how ethnonationalists in the late colonial period first promoted this racial regime to seize power and prevent revolution, a process supported by British imperialists for their own ends. Matthew Bowser is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Alabama A&M University. Brad H. Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. PhD in Public History. Asst. Prof. of Latin American History at Alabama A&M University.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Today’s episode focuses on the intersection of Islam, society, and politics in Indonesia, the world’s single-largest majority Muslim country and the world’s third biggest democracy. Indonesian Islam is notable for its diversity, its associational strength, and its prominent role in both the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy in the late 1990s and in democratic politics in the country since that time. To discuss this huge, complicated topic, Dialogues on Southeast Asia turns to Professor Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Global Studies at Boston University. Professor Hefner is the author of four major studies of Islam in Indonesia: Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton University Press, 1985), The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretive History (University of California Press, 1990), Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2000), and, most recently, Islam and Citizenship in Indonesia: Democracy and the Quest for an Inclusive Public Ethics (Routledge, 2024). He is also the author of a long list of journal articles and book chapters and the editor or co-editor of no less than fifteen edited or co-edited volumes, many of which serve as foundational texts in the comparative study of religion and of Islam in particular. A towering figure in the study of Islam in Indonesia and in the comparative study of religion more broadly. Robert Hefner’s work spans the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and political science to cover the intersection and interplay of religion, society, and politics in Indonesia and beyond.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the more-than-human entanglements between empires and the creatures they govern. What is the relationship between the subjugation of human communities and that of animals? How did various interactions with animals enable articulations of power between diverse peoples? This book is one of the first to tackle these questions in the context of a Southeast Asian colonial city.Drawing from rich, archival material and with an attentiveness to visual sources, this study analyses the varied and messy positioning of animals in a city – as sources of protein, vectors of disease, cherished pets and impressed labor. The book’s deliberate focus on everyday animals such as dogs and horses – common in growing cities worldwide at the time – connects the history of colonial Singapore to a broader urban history, addressing what modernity means in terms of human-animal relationships. In our conversation, we discuss more-than-human-imperialism, the question of animal agency, the performative aspects of animal welfare and a few exciting, related reading recommendations by the author.Faizah Zakaria is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarienSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why have Asian states - colonial and independent - imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps? How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole? Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History (Brill, 2022) is an ambitious book surveys the systems of detention camps set up in Asia from the beginning of the 20th century in The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Timor, Korea and China.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore (MIT Press, 2024), Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore.Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic new world city, Singapore, Wang contends, is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in various sites, from the futuristic, authoritarian Supertree Grove, positioned as a technologically sustainable solution to a velocity-charged and singular urban transportation system, to highly protected nature reserves and to the cemeteries, where graves and memories continue to be exhumed and erased to make way for development. Wang also attends to more contingent yet hopeful alternatives that aim to reconfigure current urban approaches. In the face of growing enthusiasm for building high-tech, sustainable, and “natural” cities, Wang ultimately argues that urban imaginings must create space for a more relational understanding of urban environments.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies